Okay, so the initial idea is too harsh to enable any reasonable survival barring massive use of magic.
New plan: People show up wearing clothes and carrying their basic equipment and tools and stuff. Say the mysterious effect brought in people plus any loose objects within a small radius of them, so many (but not all) arrived with the tools of their trade plus some miscellaneous junk. I think I still want to 'reboot' magic so that it doesn't just become 'wizards rule everything' from day one.
The idea is that I'm going to run a game of cooperative worldbuilding, where the players each pick a race that determines the starting races that appear on this world, and have some influence in determining how well their fledgeling nation begins. The campaigns will be fairly short, each one taking place probably a few generations after the previous ends, with the new party being descendants of the previous party. There will be new gods emerging, based on the actions of the players. This does mean no divine casters for the first game, but they will be available later.
Assuming that behind the plot there is some force that deliberately transported all those people and doesn't want them to die immediately: the area where they are transported might already contains a limited amount of edible (fruits, nuts, roots) and utility (stalks suitable for making wicker, softwoods) plants as well as some amount of easily accessible stone (preferably flint) and source of fresh water.
If there is no sapient force behind the transportation and it is just a cosmic fluke... Tough luck. There will be casualties assuming that anyone survives a few first weeks...
I don't see how you're going to restrict a spon caster or divine caster to 1st level spells. Wizards without spellbooks will have to probably have the sorcs use spellcraft to carve their spells known onto slates carefully to build an initial library.Sorcerers do not have any class features that allow them to scribe spells into a spellbook. Their magic is innate, not learned.
And they don't take scribe scroll as a feat either.
Making wizards far more valuable to the burgeoning society struggling to survive than the typical sorcerer. Wizards teach magic to those who have even a basic capacity to learn and often build libraries and other repositories of information to survive their deaths. I'd not be surprised to see a heavily multi-classed society born from this calamity as cantrips and orisons are invaluable, as so well demonstrated above.
Witches will also be invaluable being the only healing-capable arcane casters of note besides bards. I believe both are taught, not born with their abilities, although I'm not 100% on this.
When the Gods they knew provide no miracles, they will find new Gods. Some are likely to be very unpleasant in such a time of austerity, deprivation, desperation and strife.
If they're coming from Golarion, Druids of the Green Faith should prosper and thrive as their beliefs are beholden to no deities.
In a population of 10,000 souls, the odds of everyone being all cooperative is small, especially past the relative short-term of a year or two. The RP dynamics to be had are staggering.
A fascinating scenario to be sure.
Clerics of one god in a new world are typically picked up by gods of the same alignment/spheres in the new world, either as a nod to their patron or as a incarnation of same. Clerics won't have problems.
Druids have as much time finding people nature talks to as gods have problems finding viable clerics. That said, rural folk do respect druidic ways more then cityfolk.
The raw material for a book is not a tree. A tree is the raw material for cut lumber and paper. Paper, leather, and thread are the raw materials for a book. You can't drag a dead horse, bundle of raw flax, and a fresh cut tree together and zing them into a book. Fabricate works off the raw material for what you are making. For second and third tier items, that requires processed goods.
i.e. it won't work the same way you can't zing iron ore directly into finished armor. You first need processed metal.
So, there's some restrictions on Fabricate...but the tools to make first tier processed goods are simpler then those to make the second, which are often more time intensive, as well. Fabricate can leverage that time factor by literally hundreds of workdays for more complex goods.
==Aelryinth
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Should I just not bother at all? :I
The basic premise of having a group of people trying to survive and (re)build the civilization is great one. We just need to tweak a starting conditions to give them a decent chance of not dying of deprivation too early.
Personally I think from time to time of making Alpha Centauri-like campaign: fresh SF colony in another star system. The group would have a decent amount of starting resources but recently I though that maybe the campaign could be placed on a fleet of big sub-light generational ships that are slowly degrading both in technological base and scientific knowledge with each generation passing...
If I ever get to start either of that campaign I won't be using Pathfinder for sure, though. Assuming that the player won't rebel I'd prefer using GURPS.
Umbral,
an alternative is to do it the MMORPG way.
Asheron's Call subsumed the idea that people were arriving through random portals slowly all the time, plucked out of their lives and dropped into the new world - these were mostly the PC's, but most of the human NPC's in the setting arrived that way, too.
So, the players could literally be the 'tip of the spear', setting up an area for colonization with proper gear, due to impending catastrophe/religious persecution/divine fiat/interfering alien intelligences/random chaos whimsy/exploration/imperial expansion.
They have to figure out the way this new world works, set up the core infrastructure, explore, etc, all the good stuff a colony does.
This removes the onus of overpopulation, but you can easily set a clock on the amount of time they have. If the world behind them is going to explode in two years, they have a LOT of work to be done, and people will coming in continuously behind them to be put to work. If there is no communication behind them, and its one-way, you can simply set up arbitrary surges in population incoming both as stresses for them and additional resources.
In this scenario, Sendings from the far side, and the terse replies, could provide some level of coordination. You could even write out the questions, and the PC's would have to agonize over their short allowed replies to determine what kind of supplies come with them. If all magic items are consumed to power the transit, that would explain starting from 0, but they should be able to get craft goods and the skilled laborers they need as they need them, IF they plan for it.
This kind of thing is much closer to a turn by turn resource management game, i.e. kingdom building, then Pathfinder. You might want to look at the kingdom building rules from Kingmaker and later, and put your own spin on them.
The 'six kingdoms' could be coming in at different places, and more amusingly, for different reasons. One is to escape a rising Undead cascade that is consuming the world. Another is fleeing religious/racial persecution (perhaps for good reason!) One is an enlightened civilization out to explore the universe, and perhaps leave their stuffy old world behind. One is an old empire with population problems wanting to expand somewhere with new wealth, resources, and chances for war and glory to relieve pressure at home. Another simply has their people being picked up and dropped in the area for no discernible reason, and just adapting as they go (orcs are good for this, they don't need a reason to be anywhere).
==Aelryinth
This thread makes me want to play Civilization again.
Or Alpha Centauri, but I can't get it running on my comp...
Any race?
Wyrwood... Food, sleep, and healling irrelevant. Do I win?
The staggered arrival might work well, so here's an idea so that the event happens all at once but doesn't present immediate population problems:
When this chunk of land arrives in this new world, its people are covered in some kind of hard material. They are in protected stasis within this substance, which erodes over time. A few people wake up, freed from their cocoons upon arrival. Over time, others come out of their stasis.
Given no interference, the entire population will be awake within about five years, but it's not difficult to break people out of stasis harmlessly.
sounds like a fun game if most people were NPC classes. let's face it most people tend to be NPC classes anyway.
Wizards have a spellbook class feature, Sorcerers do not. Again, sorcerers are innate casters, not learned ones. They can't learn spells by cribbing off a wizard's spellbook, it stands to reason that they can't write down spell formulas either. Wizards cast spells by preparing a spell matrix in a spell slot. Sorcerers have the matrix burned into them and use spell slots to energise them off when they cast.You're conflating scribe scroll with spellbooks. That is not the case. PFS wizards don't have scribe scroll...are you saying they can't make spell books?
The Ring of Spell Knowledge specifically allows you to teach it spells by using spellbooks, scrolls, or seeing the spell in question being cast. Straight spellcraft check, no class features required except being a spon caster.
So, even if for some reason they can't make the spellcraft check to write down the basics of a spell, they can still study such things to use the Ring. If that means paying for a copy of a spell, that's fine, too. Also a good use for the pages from an enemy spellbook. Or toting around a copy of the wizard's spellbook, so there's a backup for both of them in the party, who knows?
And 'learning' a spell from a spellbook is a straight spellcraft check, no class feature cited, so yes, the Sorc could even do so to learn one of his Spells Known. I will concur that 'scribe spell into spellbook' is not actually a free spellcraft check, so it might require Scribe Spell...or a wizard to do the scribing.
==Aelryinth