Golarion demography


Lost Omens Campaign Setting General Discussion


After a little bit of research(mostly on reddit), it seems 50% of Golarion population is human. Which doesn't leave a lot of space for other races.

Do you think this is correct? If not, do you know the right numbers? Any demographics in the books?

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

50%? In the Inner Sea region, I'd say it's more like 80%. Inner Sea is humano-centric on purpose, this is one of the underlying concepts of the setting.


That's still a lot of people, irregardless of race.


It is unlikely that you will get a proper demography of the planet- paizo likely prefers to keep the right to make a massive civilization of mole people at will.

Seriously- the darklands and the various aquatic species put a serious amount of population outside of the 'civilized world' humans live in. And that is disregarding various races that might live past the inhospitable jungles, on undiscovered continents, or on sky islands. Whatever.

So it is best just to focus on the demography of the inner sea region, which is where most of the content produced occurs.

Grand Lodge

My feeling is that Gorbacz's 80% humans in the Inner Sea is much closer to Doppleman's 50% humans in the Inner Sea.

Outside of Kyonin, Five-Kings-Mountains, Geb, The Darklands and Belkzen, the communities in the Inner Sea are 90% human. So overall I'd probably go with 75-80% human.

That's for the civilized communities, of course...
Once you get into the Mushfens or Churlwood of Varisia, the depths of the Verduran forest or World's Edge Mountains in Taldor, the vast wilderness of Mammoth Lords Realms or Irrisen, the teeming jungles of Mwangi, the Brazen Peaks of Katapesh, etc., and etc., and etc., .... That percentage of human population goes way, way down.

But communities and civilizations, heavy human demographic.


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Paizo loooooooooooves their Humans. If a society isn't Human or Halfling (AKA short, boring Humans), it's an antisocial fringe society with xenophobic tendencies. Pretty much like W E Ray said, anywhere important you're going to interact with for more than a couple minutes is almost entirely Human.
I'm okay with Humans being the norm, but I find Golarion a bit excessive with it. Maybe if the niches occupied by a couple of the ten trillion subraces/cultures of Humans were occupied by... anything else?


I always figured the reasoning behind having so many humans in-setting is because they tend to be played more often. So they just reconciled that tendency into the setting. Also, we're humans, so having most things written for/by human points of view in-setting lends itself easier to explaining stuff.


Have you considered that the vagueness and huuuuuge gaps in canonical geography allow a GM's bias in these matters to have much more impact than any setting data. This being a good thing, Paizo would be foolish to go to the extreme effort to fill in these gaps since that would weaken their market. If it suits you, then yes, the non-humans are overwhelmingly outnumbered and outgunned by the humans. If it suits you, the human dominated lands are the surface of a bubble filled with all sorts of strangeness.

As to why Paizo focuses on humans... Well, it's easier, and is far less likely to trigger a lot of negative bias issues in their fanbase.

(This adaptability doesn't affect Society play since in that "realty" subset nothing effectively exists outside of the module being played at the moment.)

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