| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I have run homebrew game in pathfinder 1e like twice, but I mostly run adventure paths in same continuity, so yeah Golarion here x'D
(I run once "ooh spooky misty cursed island" sandbox that lasted few weeks before players had to quit and stone age campaign.)
(I am also running 5e campaign in faerun that is homebrew, because the newbie rpg player group I run 5e beginner box for when I tried out running 5e is still on going campaign :p We did beginner box, then curse of strahd then homegrew, they want to go until level 20 and I like players so I'm continuing running it even though I don't like the system xD Ah well at least I get to do my crazy homebrew stuff
Also running Devastation Ark aka starfinder currently)
On sidenote, mapping is paaaaaaaaaaaaaain. I do like both world building and improvisation, but making world maps is paaaaaaaaaain xD
Have you tried Wonderdraft?
I am with you. I have spent countless hours creating maps over my GM career either by hand or digitally with a variety of imaging tools and/or mapping software.
I purchased Wonderdraft about 3 weeks ago and in about 4 hours crafted a campaign map that was magnitudes better looking than anything I did before. And it is dead simple to modify later as it develops and exportable in a variety of formats.
I would post a link to their website but unsure if that would violate any forum rules.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
My issue with official settings is you let players loose in it, then you either know a lot about the setting so they can explore it, or you don't. Then you either make stuff up and the players are fine because they don't know anything about the setting, or you have problems.
So to me it's better to just make your own stuff up at that point. Then the players can help building and changing things. My issue there is I'm more big concept and less detail oriented, so my personal setting I'm working on bogs down when I make metropolitan cities as there's just too many things I want to put in them.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I'll second Wonderdraft. Its what I used to make my game world. One of the features of the program is that it can zoom in on a section of your game world, like a Kingdom and then you can save it and then work on the kingdom map in more detail :) Love that program!
Both really. Two of my favorite things are worldbuilding and exploring lore other people have written. Homebrew settings scratch that former itch and Golarion stuff scratches the latter pretty well.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I normally do homebrew, I have a setting that I have been running since 2002 that has been run with 3rd ed, 3.5, 5e, pf1 World of Darkness, Gurps and at least 2 different homebrew rule sets. All homebrew adventures very character driven, sandbox with several plots and metaplots affected by the players but also affecting and changing the setting.
Recently I have gotten into Golarion (although it was Starfinder that got me into Paizo's settings). I like the setting and like reading about it and as I am super busy with work and have an amazing 18month old daughter I don't have the time to write much world story or homebrew stuff so am trying to find the time and players to run all the paizo APs I now have.
Paizo do really good stories, Golarion is amazingly diverse and supports many styles of game I just struggle to take story ownership when running published content which is something I am trying to get better at.
|
I have run homebrew game in pathfinder 1e like twice, but I mostly run adventure paths in same continuity, so yeah Golarion here x'D
(I run once "ooh spooky misty cursed island" sandbox that lasted few weeks before players had to quit and stone age campaign.)
(I am also running 5e campaign in faerun that is homebrew, because the newbie rpg player group I run 5e beginner box for when I tried out running 5e is still on going campaign :p We did beginner box, then curse of strahd then homegrew, they want to go until level 20 and I like players so I'm continuing running it even though I don't like the system xD Ah well at least I get to do my crazy homebrew stuff
Also running Devastation Ark aka starfinder currently)
On sidenote, mapping is paaaaaaaaaaaaaain. I do like both world building and improvisation, but making world maps is paaaaaaaaaain xD
Have you tried Wonderdraft?
I am with you. I have spent countless hours creating maps over my GM career either by hand or digitally with a variety of imaging tools and/or mapping software.
I purchased Wonderdraft about 3 weeks ago and in about 4 hours crafted a campaign map that was magnitudes better looking than anything I did before. And it is dead simple to modify later as it develops and exportable in a variety of formats.
I would post a link to their website but unsure if that would violate any forum rules.
I think I'll check that out at least.
But yeah on sidenote: I LOVE enjoying reading about lore. I also love explaining about lore :p I sometimes spend lot of time in Owlcat's discord to explain pathfinder lore xD
What I mean is that I do sometimes actually enjoy explaining lore I have studied more than lore I have created. Mostly because 1) my self esteem issues 2) when I do world building, its often focused specifically on stuff I'm super interested in 3) there is that thing where figuring out your own lore is mentally more taxing to remember it than someone else's lore.
(I do still like world building yeah, but I don't get anxiety over sharing someone else's world building than when I share my own x'D )
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Its an age of sail world designed to have countless gods
This sounds really cool. I'm a classic setting fan, but SAO opened my eyes to more variety like this. Well done.
| 7 people marked this as a favorite. |
It's about control, ownership, and fun, I suppose. We all get fun from different parts of the hobby.
My players had different views on this, because they like that I wasn't the controller and owner of the lore when playing in Golarion, at least not exclusively. It allowed them build deep characters from different parts of the world. It allowed me to say "No, there's no reason for your character to be Drow in this part of the world" because there's lore that establishes how common Drow are and it doesn't feel like I'm being arbitrary with my restriction or making up lore to justify my desires.
The players also understood that I might adjust some things to make it fit my vision better, but also understood that I was going to make huge changes to the game world. I was more going to be like a surgeon removing and replacing bits to make it fit the collective vision better.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I also like how the setting can flesh out things that I personally don't give a hoot about, or don't have the experience to write well enough. Like, I tend to ignore sea-faring content, and having grown up mostly on euro-centric fantasy, I'm sure my Mwangi Expanse and Tian Xia analogues would have been left rather flaccid.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'm in the same boat as WatersLethe. Using Golarion fills in gaps on things I don't or won't think about. Creating a mythology and history of a world is hard work, and my storytelling is more of the pulpy "check out this wild stuff" type.
That said, I have been poking at making a setting that is centered more on Christian esoterica. Saints would be the stand in for gods for the central religion. This interest of mine has been revived by Blasphemous, and I'll probably take another stab at making this setting.
So I take it that wonderdraft isn't free program to even try out?
No but I do recall it being cheap, i bought it a long time ago.
So I take it that wonderdraft isn't free program to even try out?No but I do recall it being cheap, i bought it a long time ago.
It's a one-time purchase of $30. Dungeondraft (for making battle maps) is a one-time purchase of $20.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'm an exceedingly lazy GM, so I run adventures in Golarion, with minor tweaks depending on party makeup. My disposable income is far greater than my spare time, so I will buy what I need for my games every time, provided it is available for purchase.
Intend to stick to APs, but will make up things/places on the fly if need be. My friend and I have traded running games for our group, and while mine have been Golarion, his were in generic locations (small town over a mega dungeon, an icy mountain area, etc) so we've crammed them into Golarion for funsies.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
I've been developing my own world, Kethlan, for the past 20 years. I can't imagine running in a world that isn't my own.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I remember playing growing up, (pre-pathfinder) while in other people's games they were often ostensibly in one of the predefined settings, be they Blackmoor, Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Mystara, Dragonlance or Dark Sun. But given the limitation on availability of resources that primarily defined certain parts of it but left a lot of 'to be defined' areas an details.
When I got old enough where I was expected to run games, there was this part of me that I felt, out of respect for the 'authors' of various settings, that I couldn't guess what they would have intended to have here or there, and so felt a constrained in the ability to 'run' in their world. (as if they would ever find out what I did, and be concerned about it)
This led me to tend to use those settings as inspirations for my own world building, taking things from them, aspects from them and to be honest also rules systems when they come out as inspiration for my own worlds. So most of my running games were in a variety of my own home brewed worlds.
I helped run some games for someone else in PBP world that was very customized, with an e6 slant to it and custom world/campaign which often allowed a lot of content from the SRD, but would need to be tied back to an applicable analog to the given setting.
More recently, may gaming with second edition has been pretty consistently Golarion, and using Paizo adventure. I still love doing my own world building and don't doubt the potential of building my own world, but at the moment the ability to have people use all the resources out there to help build their own characters, without being dependent on me working to figure out where it would fit in 'my world' has been valuable with me not necessarily have tons of time to commit to gaming. I have also gotten over most of my hang-up of feeling unable to expand upon a published setting for my own purposes, which I used to feel constraining me when I used to try to use them.
I imagine if I had more time, I'd probably develop my own campaign setting myself, but I really like the variety throughout Golarion's world. I wouldn't find it too hard, if I disagreed with a particular part (say spaceship in my fantasy setting, which incidentally is fine for me, but an easy example to point out) I wouldn't have much trouble just telling my players Numeria doesn't exist. Then I could replace it with either some other civilization, or a wilderness, are a desolate land that was devastated by something a long time in the past, and never recovered. If players wanted some kind of barbarian feat from that region, I could review it and make it available elsewhere. Assuming that I did make my own campaign, I'd as a GM try to find a home for character options created for Golarion. [worse comes to worse, I'd be open to some kind of portal having brought someone from Golarion to the given setting somehow]
I'm torn with respect to the faiths, I have grown to really like many aspects of Golarion's religions and deities, however, when I was younger, developing the deities and faiths was often one of the aspects that I loved to develop for my own campaign settings. So I'm not certain if I would import Golarion's pantheons or if I would make my own and potentially use some content for inspiration, for my own setting. I have a world/setting I have wanted to develop for ages, and it demands its own mythos, but I could imagine choosing to make a 'different' world in Golarion's universe with almost all the same deities.
I am the perennial GM. I think that comes back to the fact I love reading lore and bringing that up in adventures because it pleases me. Like Sasha said, its about what you grew up with.
I run my (3) campaigns in the Forgotten Realms because that is what I know. It's more home brew now since all the history of all our past groups influence the world it is today. Been playing there since 1990, so I don't see me changing that.
However, I run only Pathfinder rules with it. I've stopped following published lore at 4e too. I use APs to fill out my Realms as well. I've plunked Giantslayer and Ironfang Invasion down side by side in the .. Giantspire Mountains near Damara and adapted it to my setting.
That said, after 2 of the 3 campaigns finish, I intend on finally running the Runelords 'Trilogy' of APs fully within Golarion. COtCT, War for the Throne I'll run and probably keep full Golarion as well.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
I personally love Golarion for the most part, and when I play adventure paths I play in Golarion.
That being said when I do homebrew I either do an original setting or take concepts from golarion and self contain them in sort of a pseudo golarion setting.
That is mainly because I have a lot of deep deep anxieties of running in a predefined setting and getting it "wrong," or failing to meet expectations of the players, or even more unrealistically the creators of Golarion. I know it's impossible for them to know what happens in my home game, and if they did at worse they would not care and at best be excited about creative and stuff but my brain can't help get the idea of a giant T-rex judging me for messing up.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
For what it's worth, I wouldn't judge you or anyone for playing Pathfinder. I'd thank you.
Thank you! For the most part I know that, every article, forum post, or discord q&a I've seen from you has made it seem like you are a kind and empathetic indvidual! Not to mention the lore that I know you worked on or brought in directly is one that is filled with empathy and love. It's just unfortunate that anxiety often doesn't care about what you know. That being said I will use this going forward to fight that anxiety when I can.
Creative Director
|
| 10 people marked this as a favorite. |
For what it's worth, I wouldn't judge you or anyone for playing Pathfinder. I'd thank you.Thank you! For the most part I know that, every article, forum post, or discord q&a I've seen from you has made it seem like you are a kind and empathetic indvidual! Not to mention the lore that I know you worked on or brought in directly is one that is filled with empathy and love. It's just unfortunate that anxiety often doesn't care about what you know. That being said I will use this going forward to fight that anxiety when I can.
Yay; hope I helped if even just a little bit. I'm pretty well familiar with the way anxiety works on the mind myself.
Yay; hope I helped if even just a little bit. I'm pretty well familiar with the way anxiety works on the mind myself.For what it's worth, I wouldn't judge you or anyone for playing Pathfinder. I'd thank you.Thank you! For the most part I know that, every article, forum post, or discord q&a I've seen from you has made it seem like you are a kind and empathetic indvidual! Not to mention the lore that I know you worked on or brought in directly is one that is filled with empathy and love. It's just unfortunate that anxiety often doesn't care about what you know. That being said I will use this going forward to fight that anxiety when I can.
It does and thank you <3
I’ve been using my current home brew world for 20 years now and I tend to apply the ruleset we are currently using. Ya I have to make some tweeks from time to time but the two tables I run as well as myself enjoy playing in the world. Probably because most of the players like to reminisce about the world events they have changed, both good and bad.
I tried homebrewing a fantasy setting. My players didnt seem to care. I thought maybe my ideas are not interesting and I had to try harder. The players just seem to care even less after more attempts. What they did care about was the immediate setting. If it was a dessert, they didn't care about tropics or tundras on the other side of the world. The occasional short hand answer "yeah that exists somewhere else" was good enough.
Turns out Golarion ended up being the best setting so far for my players. There are so many interesting places you can just campaign in while the rest of the world just does its own thing. The APs really lean into this too. So, yeah its Golarion for us. Which is fine, now I spend my energies where they are appreciated which is fine tuning campaign adventures.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
My homebrew dates back to the first Forgotten Realms grey box and is essentially a continent beyond the Trackless Sea far to the west of Evermeet. This is a version of the Forgotten Realms where Maztica, the Spellplague and the various edition cataclysms never happened.
I have used D&D (2e, 3e, 3.5e, 4e), PF1 and PF2 to tell stories there. I frequently reskin Pathfinder and D&D material to fit the setting.
I love the Golarion setting, but as a devout home brewer I do prefer to see setting material left out of core rulebooks.
I tried homebrewing a fantasy setting. My players didnt seem to care. I thought maybe my ideas are not interesting and I had to try harder. The players just seem to care even less after more attempts. What they did care about was the immediate setting. If it was a dessert, they didn't care about tropics or tundras on the other side of the world. The occasional short hand answer "yeah that exists somewhere else" was good enough.
Turns out Golarion ended up being the best setting so far for my players. There are so many interesting places you can just campaign in while the rest of the world just does its own thing. The APs really lean into this too. So, yeah its Golarion for us. Which is fine, now I spend my energies where they are appreciated which is fine tuning campaign adventures.
In my experience, players tend to only care about homebrew worlds that they have a hand in making; my favorite campaign ever started with us making the setting in a session of Microscope, and it was incredible.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
It depends a lot on the players, as a GM who specialized in it I definitely feel the pain of players using their apathy towards even the idea of setting to pressure me sometimes to deprioritize it in favor of pretty much everything, but its a part of the game that makes me happy, and it makes my adventures better, even if its indirect enough for them not to understand that.
I do have one or two who regularly tell me they love how it feels like there's a reason for everything, although one of those has become my partner in worldbuilding (they told me this way before that happened.)
Honestly sometimes I think I should curate my play group to nab players who really enjoy what I do in that sense, but recruitment is annoying, plenty of player but the process of sifting, and dealing with flakey people sucks.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I did a home setting that turned into a Golarian setting after the fact so that we could continue it.
This is that story:
Long ago a great hero defeated an ancient foe, saving the world. A giant statue was erected of him. Thousands of years later, after the village around the statue had declined and vanished, to be replaced anew by another village, then another, and another, and finally, a kingdom. After a time, none remembered the hero's name, or what he was known for. Nevertheless, due to the statue's apparent indestructibility and unnatural immobility, it became a symbol of protection and strength for the kingdom, which would later become an empire.
In the "modern age" of our heroes, the empire had gone to war with its neighbor. By this time, the heroes had already completed several harrowing adventures and had begun to make a name for themselves. So when the neighboring kingdom invaded, the heroes were called upon (some would say conscripted) to assist in repelling the enemy force from the empire. Though the empire was strong, their enemies had powerful magic that, up that point, had never been seen by the Empire of Man, and so they were able to push through to the imperial capital.
Over the statue, a team of enemy war wizards and the imperial heroes clashed with such power that the statue, for the first time in its existence, was damaged.
Though the war wizards were defeated and the invaders forced back, dread, terror, and unrest soon began to blossom among the people of the empire. Their symbol of hope had been forever tarnished. And with every passing day, the small crack in its once unblemished stone would grow slightly larger, and with it, the people's superstitious fears of ill omen too grew greater.
Great masons and mages alike were unable to repair the growing damage. Since they had indirectly caused the damage to the statue, the heroes were once again called upon to find a solution, to repair the statue before it crumbled and to heal the hearts of the people.
The party paladin knew of an ancient artifact of light and life that he thought might help mend the problem: a glowing orb, held in the bows of a great tree that grew at the heart of a mystical land of giants.
The paladin had perished years before, sacrificing himself to stop a powerful demon from destroying the heroes' home town. He was brought back to life in the land of the giants by the giants' seers, using the healing powers of the ancient artifact.
The seers foresaw that the paladin would one day bring their isolated nation to ruin. Though the paladin swore he would never do such a thing, the kindly seers claimed that it was inevitable. They believed that preventing it was not only impossible, but morally wrong. One does not mess with the fates or with the will of the gods. So they used the orb's magic to return him to life, per their prophecy.
Not all the giants agreed with their beliefs however, and though the paladin was hailed as a guest and friend by most, assassins were sent by an evil warlord to dispatch him. The warlord loved his people, and their place in the world, and wished to prevent the end of his culture. The paladin slew the giant assassins, then trekked across miles and miles of plains, swamps, and mountains (facing many monsters and hazards) to reach the warlord's mountainous keep. Hoping to put an end to the unrest and prevent a civil war among the giants, he infiltrated the warlord's throne room and bested the warlord's personal bodyguards.
Upon seeing his immortal myrmidons destroyed by one so small, the warlord surrendered. He then tricked the paladin. The warlord offered to give up his mad quest to save his people, ending the violence, if the paladin would allow the warlord to use his magic to send him home, never again to return. After all, if the paladin was gone from their lands, he could not bring ruin to the giants, and there would be no more need for such turmoil. And so the paladin rejoined his companions in his homeland.
For a time, the giants once again knew peace as the warlord resumed his role as rightful ruler of his people and reconciled with his council of seers. The seers continued to believe that the fate of their lands was inevitable, just as their ruler believed it had been averted.
Then the heroes came to the land of the giants, using knowledge of its location bestowed upon them by their paladin who--holding to his word to never return--did not join them on their quest. When the heroes of man arrived, the seers were already expecting them, and had prepared for their arrival. They showed their visitors the way to the artifact and gifted it to them. As the heroes thanked them, and were in the process of promising to return it to its rightful place one day, they were attacked by the new ruler of the giants, the son of the former warlord.
In the years since the paladin's resurrection, popular opinion had swayed against the seers, and so a great force fell upon them. The seers were murdered, giving their lives to allow the heroes time to complete a traveling ritual and escape with the artifact.
Though the heroes and paladin never knew it, the healing orb was the heart and strength of the giants, and without its presence in their lands, their mountains crumbled and shrank, their great lakes dried up growing shallow, their massive crop lands and forests diminished, and their once great people became in every way small again.
Upon their triumphant return to their homeland, the heroes found that their beloved emperor had prepared a great celebration and parade, hoping that it--along with the repair of the statue--would uplift his peoples' spirits.
Amidst the massive celebration, the heroes ceremoniously placed the artifact into the great statue's hands. It fit there as it did in the great life tree of the giants, as if it had always belonged there.
The artifacts healing magic immediately and dramatically went to work. The crack mended itself, slowly at first, but then ever so quickly as the people cheered all around.
But the magic worked too well. Once the crack had disappeared, the statue began to shrink as its stone turned to the flesh of a living man. In front of thousands of witnesses, the ancient hero dropped the orb, collapsed to his knees and cried out in a great booming voice rife with anguish:
Before collapsing into incomprehensible despair.
Then the very stars fell upon the world.
Within minutes, great flashes of light enveloped much of the empire, and indeed, much of the rest of the world as well. The explosions of light--the impact sites of the falling stars--laid waste to all it touched. For many, it was the last light they would ever see.
The celebration immediately turned to one of chaos and terror. At the edge of the imperial capital, where a star had fallen, came great and terrible creatures unlike anything anyone living had seen before (think flying, air-breathing alghollthu). They rushed the capital, killing and enslaving all in their wake as they attempted to steal the orb. However, upon touching it with their foul tendrils, it burned them, and so they called upon terrible machines of war (think retrievers) to recover it for them. These "star gods" and their monstrous servants skirmished with the heroes briefly, before their retrievers were able to escape with the artifact.
In the coming days darkness ruled all the world. Before the ancient hero succumbed to despair and death, he was able to impart to the imperial heroes (through largely lunatic ramblings) that the stars had never been stars at all, but an invasion force of ancient immortal beings from beyond the black, come to destroy the world. The beings' efforts were stymied when the ancient hero used a powerful artifact to trap them in their ships in the black.
In so doing, the power of the artifact left the ancient hero forever petrified. In time, the orb's magic became linked with the stone that grasped it, growing it in size and durability. At some point in the distant past, the statue and the orb became separated, and it came to rest in lands far across the sea, creating the nation of giants.
In the unending darkness, the monsters came. First it was the immortal star gods, then their machines of war. Their efforts were aided by slaves and human allies who had turned against their own in their despair. Among the traitors of humanity was the Church of Stars, a once benevolent organization that was corrupted by misleading prophecy and the belief that their infallible gods now walked among them.
Then, less than a year after "The Fall," mutant abominations of animals and man began to appear. The corruption of the black had begun to grow the invaders' numbers (in some cases "rewarding" loyal servants thought to have been defeated by the heroes with terrible new forms) to topple all the remaining empires of the world.
Everything after that was about saving people where possible, fighting the alien menace and their servants and monsters, recovering the lost orb, and finding and fighting their way to the heart of the immortal invaders' shapeless abomination that was the immortals' progenitor being. They then repeated the ancient hero's actions, sacrificing themselves to forever break the power of darkness over their world.
The sun actually remained in place, as did the rest of the stars. It was the ash fallout created from the "falling stars" that blackened all of the skies and made day into night. It was the Church of the Stars and their abberant masters, as well as the lunatic ramblings of an addle-brained mad-man, who lead much of humanity to believe that the actual stars had fallen. And yes, it created much strife for the surface life of the planet.
This terrible event would in the far future come to be known as Earthfall; the terrible period of time after, the Age of Darkness. The great artifact orb of light and life would eventually evolve into the Starstone. The once great cyclops empire of Ghol-Gan would never recover from the loss of their holy artifact. The alghollthu empire as we know it today are the degenerate remnants of the original invasion force that nearly ended it all eons past. In the deepest sea of Golarion, they still guard the petrified remains of the band of heroes who so long ago foiled them, where they yet plot their revenge against humanity.