Ok, I'm seriously considering getting back into D&D. I will check out the new edition and compare that to 3rd and make a choice of which system I shall play. I am an avid fan of Greyhawk, always have been. I'm not interested in any of the other D&D brand campaign settings for various reasons. Now my issue with Greyhawk is I cannot trust WOTC to support the campaign setting in the manner I would like. Therefore I would like to learn about the world put out by Paizo.
I would like you to give me your honest opinion about the Pathfinder World and tell me about it. What is it like? Tell me about what kind of Kingdoms there are? The flavor of the world? How high-tech it is? An idea of how magical it is? How powerful NPCs are? What kind of product support does the campaign setting have? How are products priced?
If you don't think that it would mesh well with D&D due to mechanical issues (or other reasons) please tell me. The last thing I want to do is buy something that doesn't work well with D&D.
Please though, don't turn this into a "its better than Greyhawk because" thread. I like Greyhawk a lot and would appreciate you keeping that in mind as you respond.
Thanks Much!
Eileen
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I'm not quite sure why you don't just use Greyhawk? I agree that it is unlikely to get much, if any, new support but you should be able to take the material you already have and build a whole campaign around that.
I'm not quite sure why you don't just use Greyhawk? I agree that it is unlikely to get much, if any, new support but you should be able to take the material you already have and build a whole campaign around that.
I'm not necessarily dumping Greyhawk, I am just tired of lack of support by the company that owns it. Its a good feeling to buy and read support products.
I'm not quite sure why you don't just use Greyhawk? I agree that it is unlikely to get much, if any, new support but you should be able to take the material you already have and build a whole campaign around that.I'm not necessarily dumping Greyhawk, I am just tired of lack of support by the company that owns it. Its a good feeling to buy and read support products.
I do have most Greyhawk products save but about 5 modules from 2nd edition. I have a large assortment of material I've taken from Cannonfire (which is essentially fan-based material), I've even provided my own on that site as well. Its just that its so scattered around its difficult to use. I have all these files but no real supplements.
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The main issue I have with Golarion, is that if I want to run a Sandbox style campaign (and be thorough) set in say, Varisia, I would need all 6 of the Rise of the Runelords volumes, all 6 of at least 2 other APs, at least 6 of the independent modules, and about the same number of the Campaign Setting sourcebooks.
The reason for this is that the information concerning Varisia and it various ruins, towns, cities, cultures and what-have-you is spread throughout all of those books (and others). This is unlike Greyhawk for example in that if I want to run a campaign set in the Marklands, I would only need about half of that number of books (if that).
Granted, in the Golarion example, I would have far more detailed information on Varisia than I would on the Marklands, but at least with the Marklands, I have a small blurb or sum such on everything that can be found in those lands, including things such as prominent ruins, towns, cities, and cultures so I at least I have a small (perhaps even vague) idea of what this or that icon on the map is, whereas with Golarion, I would not have that in a single source.
Don't get me wrong, I really like Golarion (just look at the number of Golarion-related products I subscribe to), but this is something to keep in mind if you want to run games set there AND you want to make use of what Paizo has published for it...
It's a kitchen sink setting, as already alluded to. You can play pretty much any type of story you want, from a pirate adventure to gothic horror to post-apocalypse. Alongside that, there is plenty normal fantasy tropes in place. It's also deliberately compartmentalized so if you don't like part of the setting, you can pretty easily ignore it.
It's pretty well supported, with two hardbacks and a campaign series line that publishes monthly. And the setting is deliberately designed so that everything in the hardback rulebooks exists within the setting.
If you are a fan of Greyhawk, the overall overseer of the setting (James Jacob) also lists Greyhawk as his favorite setting, and I believed was involved in producing Greyhawk material.
Also it's pretty cheap to checkout. A PDF of the hardcover is available on Paizo for like 6 bucks or so.
It's late and I don't have time to check all my facts, but you can get the general idea here.
You can see the love for Greyhawk in Golarion. Numeria is clearly intended to let you run an adventure like "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks" (although I think Erik Mona said something about "Thundarr the Barbarian"-type adventures as well). Lastwall is clearly the result of some game designer saying "What if Iuz hadn't escaped Castle Greyhawk?" The River Kingdoms are clearly the Bandit Kingdoms (although apparently there was some George R R Martin influence in there as well).
Golarion's tech level is advanced compared to most D&D worlds. There's the printing press. Some areas have firearms. And the aforementioned Numeria could even be the source of futuristic technology.
Product support? You can see for yourself the Golarion books available for 3.5 and for PFRPG here and here. I think that there's enough system-agnostic "fluff" in these books to make them worth buying no matter what gaming engine you use.
But unlike Digitalelf, I don't feel that you need all the source material on a given region to run a game in that region, unless your players are canon-lawyer types. Just get what books you want, take from those books what information you want, and go with it.
What types of kingdoms are there? What's the flavor of the world? As people have already said, it's a kitchen-sink setting. You can find a young United States, a revolutionary France, a Gothic horror kingdom, a Narnia, an undead-ridden kingdom, a high-magic kingdom, a magic-dead wasteland, a low-religion kingdom, a devil-controlled kingdom, a Jewish kingdom, and a "pulp Mars" planet, in addition to all the stuff you would expect, like Arabian-based kingdoms, Norse-based kingdoms, African-based wilderness, and dwarven- and elven-dominated regions. And that's just scratching the surface.
Want a free sample? Try browsing the Golariopedia.
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But unlike Digitalelf, I don't feel that you need all the source material on a given region to run a game in that region, unless your players are canon-lawyer types. Just get what books you want, take from those books what information you want, and go with it.
I would agree that you do not "need" all of the books to run a game set in Varisia (using my example again), especially if you are just making up your own info on the towns, and villages, but...
But if you don't have the AP (for example) that has the maps and other pertinent information of a given ruin (or two of the three cities in Varisia, which feature prominently in two of the APs), and just make that stuff up yourself... You've now painted yourself into quite the lovely corner if you then later decide you want to run the AP that prominently features that ruin (or city) you spent all that time and energy making up yourself.
With Greyhawk, this can happen, but with less source material available, the less likely this is to be a concern.
Personally, I like both approaches; I like to be able to make my own stuff up, but I also like to have some things already made for me.
It's like I said in my original post: This is just something that you need to keep in mind when running your own adventures set in Golarion if you prefer using ready-made material over that of your own making...
Well I've read the posts thus far and I can see it sounds like there is a fair amount of familiarity with Greyhawk. I must say that the Kingdom diversity that was mentioned is very appealing. Kingdoms that are relatively the same become a blur and less distinctive to the players to want to explore.
I love the idea of a lot of source material as well.
What I don't like is the guns, spaceships and other oddities, and I ignore them with Greyhawk all together.
How are the products priced?
Do I pretty much nee adventure paths to fully flesh out kingdoms or are do the sourcebooks cover that quite well? How many adventures typically make up an adventure path and how long is each one?
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It depends on what you want to do.
The Adventure Paths are 6 parts long, and each volume is $23 ($16 if you just want the PDF). Each one contains the adventure part itself, two support articles detailing parts of the setting relevant to the adventure, a bit of fiction, and a mini-bestiary with several monsters related to the area of themes of the module. More recent volumes also have sections on the backgrounds and motivations of major NPCs and new magic items found in the module (whereas older ones would just have those interspersed in the main adventure). They're 96 pages, about 50-ish of which is the main adventure.
The other main product lines are:
Modules - Adventures separate from the adventure paths. They used to be smaller (and around $14), but they got a notable size boost and are $25 (18 for a PDF).
Pathfinder Campaign Setting - This is the GM-focused line that provides the most world-info. It has the nation gazetteers, the supplements on different monster types, and stuff on a variety of other useful-to-GMs topics. Books in this are $20 (14 for just the PDF).
Pathfinder Player Companion - These are the player-focused counterpart of the Campaign Setting line. They're leaner and more focused on options that players can use to build characters; they tend towards more crunch but still have some setting information in them. They're $13 (9 for a PDF).
Pathfinder Society Scenarios- Small adventures available only in PDF format that, while designed for Pathfinder's organized play campaign, can still be useful outside of it if you're interested in running an adventure wherever they take place. They're $4.
There's a few other lines and some books in the above lines with different prices, but those are the general categories.
The only book you really *need* for the setting is the Inner Sea World Guide (note that it has an unusually cheap PDF), and you could probably get away with just using the Pathfinder Wiki instead if you really wanted to.
Beyond that, what books you get depend on where you want to run your campaign and how much detail you want on the area. The setting sourcebooks in the Campaign Setting line usually do a pretty good job of fleshing things out, enough so that you could run your own campaign with them and with no related Adventure Path articles; that said, the Adventure Path articles add on more detail if you're interested in knowing everything you can about a place/topic.
I'd suggest you start with the Inner Sea World Guide (or reading the wiki) to get an overview of the areas on and around Golarion, then grab the Campaign Setting sourcebook on whatever area you want to run (assuming there's one out for it), and then move on from there, getting other related Campaign Setting books, Player Companions, and Adventures.
Edit: Varisia, for the record, has way more material for it than any other nation. I feel like I should mention this before you choose a location (or set of locations) to focus on. If you want the place that gets the most attention, pick Varisia. If you want to avoid needing several full adventure paths and a bunch of other books and scenarios to know everything there is to know about the region, you probably want to pick a different country.
I think what I really like about Golarion is that Paizo are consistently mindful of the fact that the players are the main characters.
There are bits I don't like (guns and sci-fy stuff don't interest me and some of those out there countries are a little too much for me). Nonetheless, reading the sourcebooks feels like there's some history with lots of opportunities for the players to resolve the mysteries raised rather than lots of big picture stuff the players can't interact with without changing everything.
Are the countries back to back like they are in Greyhawk or are the spread out more with unclaimed wilderness between them?
What are the campaign maps like? How big? What kind of detail? Do they put pretty much everything on the main maps or do they just have nation maps?
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If you play in Golarion, pick one area to campaign in. The world is a convoluted mess, no cohesiveness, and just exists to allow the writers freedom to do whatever zaniness they want. I miss Greyhawk, at least it had a narrative.
The maps are typical "European stuff is where Europe is, African stuff is where Africa is, and all the other analogues are where they are" kind of thing. Yawn.
If you're looking for something cohesive, Golarion isn't it. I do second the Varisia notion for setting your campaign in from Lord Gadigan. It's probably the most "Greyhawk" part of the setting.
What I don't like is the guns, spaceships and other oddities, and I ignore them with Greyhawk all together.
I don't like them either, so I ignore them with Golarion altogether. A lot of people do.
Some countries are back-to-back and others are separated. You can get an idea by clicking on areas in this map. If you want a map that's easier to read and navigate, I might recommend this one.
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The countries are mostly back-to-back. There's a few wilderness regions (The Mwangi Expanse, Shaguang, the majority of the Crown of the World, fair chunks of Varisia, Iobaria, and the River Kingdoms, etc), but by-and-large they're right up next to each other.
The Inner Sea Region and Tian Xia both have continent-scale maps that show the countries, but don't get into individual site-detail. Articles on nations in the Adventure Paths and the Campaign Setting's nation guides have maps of the specific nation in question with more land-features labelled and sites marked (none of them in exhaustive detail, presumably since Paizo wants to be able to go back in later and add more areas to places as they flesh them out more / have more adventures set in them). The Kingmaker adventure path and parts of the Mummy's Mask one have hex-maps for overland exploration (and, in the case of Kingmaker, kingdom-building). Adventures have more-zoomed-in maps for whatever area they're in. Town articles that act as support in Adventure Paths have maps of the cities with some of the most notable buildings labelled.
Also, like houstonderek said, the world follows a general Earth-like arrangement of areas; it's not directly analogous, but it can give you a pretty good idea of what places are like based on location.
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I think what I really like about Golarion is that Paizo are consistently mindful of the fact that the players are the main characters.
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Exact opposite for me.
In APs I feel the pcs are just in the way of where the author wishes the story to go, so npcs are put there to ensure story goes that way
I think what I really like about Golarion is that Paizo are consistently mindful of the fact that the players are the main characters.
.Exact opposite for me.
In APs I feel the pcs are just in the way of where the author wishes the story to go, so npcs are put there to ensure story goes that way
Its the same thing from two different perspectives. An AP is a story that is going to a final end point. The NPCs and such as well as a DM/Player covenant insures that the players follow along with that story. In return the design of the story is such that it insures that it is the players PCs that will be the main protagonists of this story. They will be the ones that resolve it.
Not what I'm saying, thanks. At all
Way too many times stuff would have happened even without the pcs input.
I think what I really like about Golarion is that Paizo are consistently mindful of the fact that the players are the main characters.
.Exact opposite for me.
In APs I feel the pcs are just in the way of where the author wishes the story to go, so npcs are put there to ensure story goes that way
I should have specified I was speaking about the campaign sourcebooks, not the APs.
But unlike Digitalelf, I don't feel that you need all the source material on a given region to run a game in that region, unless your players are canon-lawyer types.
Anyone else afraid of this type of player? I haven't even put a group together yet, and I'm afraid to change anything about Golarion for fear of these players.
I guess I'm afraid that after lovingly putting together my vision of Golarion, my player's will say "What the hell is this?!" and tell me that I'm ruining the game.|
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I guess I'm afraid that after lovingly putting together my vision of Golarion, my player's will say "What the hell is this?!" and tell me that I'm ruining the game.
If you do make Golarion your own like this, just inform the players ahead of time that you are running your vision of the setting, and that there will be elements that may conflict with that of "Official" material.
If you then have a player who says you are ruining the game, then you know ahead of time that you are dealing with a player whose style is in conflict with your own and can make any necessary changes to your roster of players. ;-)