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- Pathfinder deities do not have stats. They are too powerful to represent with stats. Demigods, however, are sometimes started up.
- Pathfinder does not have epic rules. Instead, there's Mythic Adventures, which basically spreads what would have been epic rules out over normal levels.
- Absalom, the largest city, is not fully detailed. There might be a book about it? I forget.
- There is the Emerald Spire super-dungeon, which is a many-level dungeon.
Welcome, chris, glad you're here!
Now...
... the questions! (Rather well covered by QuidEst, already, but I'm talky, so I'mma do it too~! With links! :D)
Do they stat out their gods do the have an epic book or anyhow like the world's largest town or dungeons books
- Pathfinder deities do not have stats. They are too powerful to represent with stats. Demigods, however, are sometimes started up.
- Pathfinder does not have epic rules. Instead, there's Mythic Adventures, which basically spreads what would have been epic rules out over normal levels.
- Absalom, the largest city, is not fully detailed. There might be a book about it? I forget.
- There is the Emerald Spire super-dungeon, which is a many-level dungeon.
Pathfinder deities are a little different than you may be used to from D&D. In D&D, the gods can (and often do) have specific stats and powers and abilities printed. As QuidEst points out, the full pantheon aren't really statted - only "demigods" or lower.
In general, anything higher than CR 36 isn't going to be statted out by Paizo, and, to date, the highest CR they've gone (to my knowledge) is CR 30*, though certain 3rd-party companies have progressed beyond that, even all the way up to CR 39.
Epic rules (rules for characters beyond 20th level) do, technically, exist as part of PF, but they are rough and officially unofficial ().
The following are brief guidelines to continue play beyond 20th level. These guidelines aren't robust enough to keep the game vibrant and interesting on their own for much longer past 20th level, but they should do in a pinch for a campaign that needs, say, 22 or 23 experience levels to wrap up. Likewise, you can use these rules to create super-powerful NPCs for 20th-level characters to face.
... so keep that in mind. These rules do appear (at least in older printings) in the Core Rulebook.
Pathfinder's more "officially official" answer to the typical Epic levels idea is, as described by QuidEst, their Mythic Rules - mythic functions kind of like a slow "increasing" template that you gain along side of levels. In that fashion, you can gain mythic tiers from level 1. That said, the real purpose is to allow characters who exceed the power of 20th level people. Mythic tiers extend from tier 1 up to tier 10. Monsters can either have mythic tiers, or mythic ranks - which function nearly identically but with a few less abilities.
QuidEst mentions Absalom, however, while there are a great many products dealing with Absalom, as he notes, there is no real super-adventure site; the only real "super dungeon" kind of experience is, as he said, is the Emerald Spire. Absalom would be large enough for a similar super-adventure, but there's nothing like that. Still, if you want to know all about Absalom, the best you can get is Guide to Absalom; just be warned that it's a 3.5 product, and PF has done some setting retcons since then (though I don't know if any are explicitly in that text). You may be interested in the Inner Sea World Guide, as it holds a ton of information about all of the countries of the Inner Sea and a bit about the countries beyond, too.
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Much better than a super-dungeon, however, (at least in my opinion) is the Adventure Path, published monthly by Paizo. Any given adventure path consists of six installments, which take the characters from level 1 to somewhere near the mid-teens, similar to a super-dungeon... but with a much better story and more cohesive plot structure than a typical super-dungeon. The adventure path called Wrath of the Righteous is notable in that it actually has characters rise from 1st level all the way to 20th level and provides mythic tiers from 1st tier all the way to the maximum 10th tier!
If you're interested in mythic, Mythic Adventures is the "source book" for it, while Mythic Realms and Mythic Origins have more setting-specific information!
()
Hope all of that helps! :D
God bless you, and welcome to the forums!
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The Pathfinder universe is centered around the world Golarion. Specifically, the Inner Sea region between Avistan in the north and Garund to the south. The various nations have many real-world analogs, with western cultures chiefly represented in Avistan and Indian, Arabic, Egyptian and similarly themed settings located in Garund.
Pathfinder has modules, as did 3.5, but it also has Adventure Paths. They're pre-made campaigns, designed to advance player characters through several levels over many, MANY game sessions.
I'm not well versed on the Pathfinder multiverse, though I'm sure others on the forums will be glad to fill you in on that topic.
As for old gods, you've got Hastur, Nyarlathotep and other members of Cthulhu and Friends to satisfy your insane cult needs. Lovecraftian elements are scattered throughout Golarian. Apparently R'lyeh is still on Earth, however, so we've got that going for us. Which reminds me...one adventure path has the PCs going to World War I Russia, so there's a precedence for our planet being accessible from the Pathfinder universe.
Compared to the Forgotten Realms, the Inner Sea region is a lot more varied thematically. I'm a big fan of Faerun, so I've been slow to warm up to Golarian. But I'm getting there. If nothing else, there's no Elminster hanging around Avistan.
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heres a biggesr question i bought the indy humble bundle for the pathfinder i always thought it was a dnd knock off reading it its pretty good set over all, if you don;t mind me asking are all the campain settings on here are in one coherent universe? is it a multiverse like in dnd 3.5 how do they treat demonds and devils and angels and gods of long past ect/
Oh! The setting is great!
I came to PF as a Forgotten Realms and Eberron fan, but I highly recommend Golaion (the setting used by Pathfinder as it's default, in the same way Greyhawk was D&D's default setting)!
Golarion is a very coherent setting (for a given understanding of "coherent") and has more ancient lore than you can shake a stick at.
Basically, unlike D&D which has multiple settings, Pathfinder only has Golarion as it's "official" setting, with any other settings being the domain of home brew campaigns.
Golarion (the name of the main "planet" the setting takes place on, like naming the Forgotten Realms setting "Toril") is a kind of kitchen sink/hodgepodge world that seeks to allow a little something for everyone, while giving it a mostly-coherent history* that delivers on ancient history with lots of ancient stuff.
One thing to know is that the gods of Golarion are not like the gods of Forgotten Realms - Golarion has had at least two gods of magic, for example, but no major change has happened to magical forces during the change-over. Instead, the gods of magic are simply gods who's areas of concern (that is, the things that directly tie to their interests and thus gain influence over by way of effort and focus) is that of magic - in other words, they think magic is really neat and super-important, and thus preach the glories of magic, and "hey, look what I can do with it" type messages. This means, for example, that if a god of magic dies, magic keeps right on truckin' and the setting doesn't undergo a fundamental shift (similarly, the death god of humanity doesn't cause humanity to stop working, nor does the death of the god of the moon cause the moon to crash). While a god gains influence over what they are concerned with, they are not the incarnation of that thing, such that a dead god = the death of that concept.
*
Outsiders are outsiders.
The (very brief and probably slightly wrong) history of the multiverse (more or less, kind-of sort-of) goes as follows:
- stuff happened; some creatures know, but either they're not talking about it, or there are multiple mutually-contradictory stories of the origin of the multiverse (all of which might actually be true)
- at some ancient point, in the middle of the Maelstrom (the thing that the Astral flows to... sort of), the proteans (the CN outsiders) who are, as far as anyone can tell, the oldest pre-existing things in the multiverse decide to start exploring beyond reality, and thus open a gate to the Abyss. WOOPS.
- proteans and the qlippoth (the CE residents of the abyss, who have apparently been around longer than the proteans, which isn't, strictly speaking, possible, but that's chaos for you) begin an eternal war of "I'll kill you dead, forever!" because the qlippoth hate everything and want to rip it apart and murder it all, and the proteans like not being dead
- this allows Axis (the lawful neutral plane) to move in (or maybe Axis was already there? This part is unclear.) and allow order to flourish in the multiverse; the proteans and qlippoth and axiomites (the LN outsiders) now face a war on three fronts; so the axiomites work together (as is their want) and create the inevitables to fight the war for them while they go about establishing perfect law
- stuff happened; some creatures know, but either they're not talking about it, or there are multiple mutually-contradictory stories of the origin of the multiverse (all of which might actually be true)
- the most ancient of the gods and angels and the like are busy creating and/or maintaining and/or restructuring reality (like creating stars or stuff)
- eventually mortal worlds are born, mortals get souls and live and die, and the Procession starts; mortal souls gots to have places to go, and aren't all of the same alignment, and Pharasma (who was already there? We don't know. Anyway, at some point, maybe from the beginning, maybe not, she was the true neutral goddess of death) is all like, "Heeeeeeeeeck no, they can't stay in my yard!" and so starts shoving them off to where they belong.
- Axis finds utility in the lawful neutral souls; Hell happily collects the lawful evil souls, and heaven takes the lawful good souls, and the enlightened neutral good souls ascend to Nirvana (the NG one, instead of Elysium in D&D), while the chaotic good and chaotic neutral souls are allowed to be free range mostly in Elysium (the CG one, instead of Ysgard in D&D) but also in the Maelstrom, 'cause chaos. Sadly, Pharasma has to do something with the chaotic evil souls, and the moon that will devour the omniverse can only hold so many souls at once, you know? So she starts shoving the rest down the literal hole that is the Abyss. But then she's all like, "Ah, dang, wat do with the neutral evil souls? They're so... grrrroooooossssssss..." and so, eventually, because there were a lot and she hated them, and there wasn't really anything else for it, she allowed them to have their own place, Abaddon (kind of like Hades, Carceri, and so on all rolled into one terrible awfulness); Pharasma had a ton of ideas on how to handle the neutral souls, so, you know, she did that. Gods got first preference (probably?) for their worshipers.
- Anyway, speaking of gods, the ancient ones were busy mostly getting along and making sure the first world (fey realm, before the material) was made, the material was made, and so on. There were good ones and evil ones and they fought, but, you know, it's not too bad.
- Those neutral evil souls all shoved together in one place turned out exactly as bad as Pharasma thought, becoming a soul-eat-soul society where they generally just went "You know... I hate everything! I want to make sure that souls stop! After all, my entire existence is pain, and the best way to assuage that and prevent others from feeling this is by total nonexistence by consumption!" aaaaaaaaaaaand thus the daemons (the NE outsiders; not demons) were born.
- The war with the qlippoth is not going well for the qlippoth. Or proteans. Or inevitables. But, you know, that's about to be expected. And the qlippoth were super squicked out by the sudden influx of all these... soul... things... that started getting shoved down their (literal) hole of a universe, so, at some point, an uber-qlippoth, a qlippoth that has forever been unmatched prior or since, rose up and decided to rend everything and destroy it all to nothing.
- Well, the other gods, obviously, didn't like this. So they fought this new qlippoth, named Rovagug. It... it didn't go well. Lots of gods died. Loooooooooooooooooots of gods died. The gods were kind of in a tight spot, some even pretty sure it was the end of everything.
- Then this one upity angel named Sarenrae went, "No way, guys! We can't stop now! This bad guy has to be stopped! We can do it!" And so they gave her a fiery sword, and let her talk with Asmodeus into making a trap in a planet around the very star she had created, and then she taunted the big god-killing thing into running really fast after her, until she fought it to a stand-still near the trap. Asmodeus finished, and Sarenrae was all, "Nyah-nyah, you totally can't charge me and devour me~!" and Rovagug was all, "I can so! RAWR~!" and charged her and Sarenrae dodged at the last minute, and Rovagug got stuck in the trap, and the gods sealed the world back up. And so Golarion has an evil god of destruction sealed inside. And Sarenrae became a goddess. And Asmodeus holds the key to Rovagug's prison. Nervously.
- Those daemons decided to run an experiment. Since they'd just kind of spontaneously evolved due to their souls blending with their plane, in their desire to wipe out all of existence, they decided to try out forcing the same thing to happen (after all, Rovagug, though he was a jerk, nearly destroyed everything, so maybe they could get a new weapon they could control). Well, everything went fine and dandy, until the process went out of control (because, you know, chaos). Turns out, the Abyss just kind of figured out how to do the whole thing itself, and now demons just kind of happen on their own. With a "Whoops~!" the daemons left (after naming their new inventions after themselves, or something, one supposes) and demons and qlippoth immediately came into conflict. There just so many gosh-darn sinful souls, though, the demons quickly outnumbered the qlippoth and started to win. The proteans never really saw much difference between them, and the battle between the Abyss and Maelstrom just kept going.
- Other stuff happened.
- Golarion was settled by people somewhere during all of this. In no particular order...
- Cyclops used to have a powerful empire. They don't now.
- The Serpentfolk, led by their racial god (really, a demigod), managed to become insanely powerful... but were still beaten by the humans. (Because a mythic hero, Savith, managed to chop the god's head off in a super-duel. She died, of course, but dropped the still-living head into a volcano before shuffling off the mortal coil because she was just that awesome.
- Gnomes got run out of the first world and stopped being fey, becoming gnomes.
- Elves came from another planet, but went native pretty fast.
- Humans became powerful due to Aboleth influence (though whether as an experiment or from using their old stuff is hard to say)
- Halflings... happened... at... some... point?
- The Aboleth became ticked that humans were so daggum arrogant about using their stuff and being successful and powerful. So the aboleth summoned a meteor to kill the world. It worked! (Sort of.) This is called Earthfall. It sucked.
- The world experienced a really daggum long time of darkness.
- The elves mostly retreated before it happened, realizing that something bad was happening and getting out of dodge while the getting's good.
- The humans were stuck and their civilization was destroyed. So an old man in Garund (named Old Mage Jtambe) decided to do something about that and talked with the head of the decapitated serpent god to learn how to preserve civilization. He learned, realized how evil the serpent god was, sewed its lips shut and turned it into an evil artifact instead of a living god's head, and dropped it back into the fiery chasm from whence it came. And then saved civilization on his continent (albeit restricted to a single city). Because he's the best.
- During this time, the dwarves, receiving divine visions when under assault from evil forces from all side, tunneled upward to escape and live. They unfortunately ran into (and drove out) the orcs before them, which, sadly, put orcs into the surface world. But eventually, the dwarves broke through and arrived! They immediately built Sky Fortresses (fortresses that are able to look into that alien place known as "the sky").
- A human hero, immortal from before the Earthfall, found the main rock that had been summoned. He'd been doing all sorts of things to make sure humanity hadn't gone extinct during his tenure, and finally, he went into the depths of the sea, pulled up the weird god-rock (that the Aboleths had accidentally called, as it turned out; they just wanted a normal meteor) and ascended to become a god. This event ended the Age of Darkness. One-to-three other gods ascended somewhere in this time (Irori, Nethys, and/or Urgathoa)?
- the god of humanity. He reestablished worldwide civilization by founding the empire of Taldor, ascending to Axis, and promising his eventual return. This was the god Aroden.
- Lots of stuff happened. Read the Inner Sea World Guide for more. Daggum some of this stuff is epic. During this time, four of the gods from Golarion (who started as mortals) ascended to godhood.
- Aroden never returned. Instead, he died; mysteriously, at the same moment his return was supposed to occur. For reasons that people don't understand, Pharasma judged and processed his soul immediately, before anyone could really figure out what happened. Prophecy suddenly started to fail, and many of the powerful works Aroden had made came undone.
- A short while later, and here we are.
Bear in mind, that's the super-short Cliff-notes, plus tongue-in-cheek humor version.
Lots of super-cool things (like how Aroden abandoned Taldor when that nation lost its focus on him, for the glorious Cheliax; or the death of Aroden's herald, the demigoddes Arazni, at the hands of the returned lich Tar-Baphon; or... oh it's just so cool~!) happened, but I'd recommend exploring Pathfinderwiki.com. If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask! :D
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The Pathfinder universe is centered around the world Golarion. Specifically, the Inner Sea region between Avistan in the north and Garund to the south. The various nations have many real-world analogs, with western cultures chiefly represented in Avistan and Indian, Arabic, Egyptian and similarly themed settings located in Garund.
Pathfinder has modules, as did 3.5, but it also has Adventure Paths. They're pre-made campaigns, designed to advance player characters through several levels over many, MANY game sessions.
I'm not well versed on the Pathfinder multiverse, though I'm sure others on the forums will be glad to fill you in on that topic.
As for old gods, you've got Hastur, Nyarlathotep and other members of Cthulhu and Friends to satisfy your insane cult needs. Lovecraftian elements are scattered throughout Golarian. Apparently R'lyeh is still on Earth, however, so we've got that going for us. Which reminds me...one adventure path has the PCs going to World War I Russia, so there's a precedence for our planet being accessible from the Pathfinder universe.
Compared to the Forgotten Realms, the Inner Sea region is a lot more varied thematically. I'm a big fan of Faerun, so I've been slow to warm up to Golarian. But I'm getting there. If nothing else, there's no Elminster hanging around Avistan.
Naturally, there are a few other places. Tian Xia is there for all your Far East adventure themes. And I haven't seen a lot developed for it yet but I'm really interested to see how they take Arcadia.
There's also at least a few articles about places a little offshore, like the other planets in the solar system. Just watch out for those tour guides offering you vacations to lovely Eox.
Of course, you don't HAVE to go that far.
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Do they stat out their gods do the have an epic book or anyhow like the world's largest town or dungeons books
To add to what's already been said, there's a lot of 3rd party support to PF. Rappan Athuk can easily be plunked into Golarian, just to give one example.
Golarion is a very coherent setting (for a given understanding of "coherent") and has more ancient lore than you can shake a stick at....
That is a really good summary. Kudos to you Tacticslion.
I played DnD 2ed, 3.X ed, and 5th along with PF. I find that Golarian is "cleaned up" Toril, and while I love the PlaneScape multiverse, the Outer Planes of PF have a unique and interesting feel to them.
Golarion is a very coherent setting (for a given understanding of "coherent") and has more ancient lore than you can shake a stick at....
That is a really good summary. Kudos to you Tacticslion.
I played DnD 2ed, 3.X ed, and 5th along with PF. I find that Golarian is "cleaned up" Toril, and while I love the PlaneScape multiverse, the Outer Planes of PF have a unique and interesting feel to them.
Hah! Glad you like it!
Yeah, Toril's history and Golarion's have some similarities to them. Some things that just kind of happened way back when in Toril are actually still-relevant things in Golarion and some still-relevant things from Toril just aren't really in Golarion; and vice-verse.
I heart me some Forgotten Realms (like, a lot), but I also really enjoy Golarion.
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Yeah, Toril's history and Golarion's have some similarities to them. Some things that just kind of happened way back when in Toril are actually still-relevant things in Golarion and some still-relevant things from Toril just aren't really in Golarion; and vice-verse.I heart me some Forgotten Realms (like, a lot), but I also really enjoy Golarion.
For some reason the FR world always felt more of a "made up as we go along" and less coherent, while Golarian feels more...uh.....natural? With less Mary Sues? However, I really read into FR in my teens and now really reading Golarian in my 30s, so it might be a case of my thinking more then the actual writing/designing.
Also, for a "Quick-Version" of the Inner-Sea World, see this thread: Here!
Tacticslion, if you want to do something similar to what Hama did for the Golarian Gods or the Outsiders, I promise to read it.
I'm all intimidated, now! I couldn't possibly! (But maybe. Just not right now...)
EDIT:
To paraphrase the devs, the gods are not statted out A) because they're just that darned powerful, and B) because if you stat it, they will kill it.
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I'm all intimidated, now! I couldn't possibly! (But maybe. Just not right now...)
EDIT:
No rush.
FYI, I printed off Hama's list and put it inside my Inner Sea World Guide book. You too can have your stuff printed (I actually likely will print your stuff you wrote and put in in the ISWG or one of the Chronicles books).
So no pressure either.
Grgpblrgptz~! Q.o