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I have a confession to make: I, personally, don't like the Golarion setting. Like, at all. I only use PF2e as a rules system. Although the forum doesn't have a poll feature I was wondering: How many people here actually use/adhere to the 'Lost Omen's' setting and how many just create their own or apply the PF2e rules to a different setting?
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I run games in the core setting. I mostly play adventure paths. I'm a bit of a Golarion geek.
I play in one game set in the Forgotten Realms. And I daydream that someday I can play in a PF2 game set in Eberron.
Of the three games I'm currently running, one is in Golarion and two are in my homebrew setting.
I run games in the core setting. I mostly play adventure paths. I'm a bit of a Golarion geek.
I play in one game set in the Forgotten Realms. And I daydream that someday I can play in a PF2 game set in Eberron.
That seems trivially easy to accomplish considering we have alchemist and inventor as official classes.
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I prefer to run my own setting. Part of the fun for me as a DM is world building.
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God pf2 would work so well for Eberron. Just the concept of Dragon marks in a system with ancestry feats built in...I run games in the core setting. I mostly play adventure paths. I'm a bit of a Golarion geek.
I play in one game set in the Forgotten Realms. And I daydream that someday I can play in a PF2 game set in Eberron.
Dragonmarked versatile heritage, anyone?
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We play 100% in Golarion. It's just easy. there is so much lore and interesting areas and places to explore.
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I parted ways with Golarion a long time ago. I've run PF1 campaigns in Kobold Press' Midgard and Frog God Games' Lost Lands. My current PF2 campaigns are set in the Lost Lands.
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I personally just decided that my home setting is just a different planet in the universe that contains Golarion, and then I altered the overall metaphysics a little bit to work the way I wanted.
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how many just create their own or apply the PF2e rules to a different setting?
Of the games I've played in, it's been about 1/2 Golarion, 1/2 homebrew.
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I prefer to run my own settings (and have ran two games of varying lengths in my own settings) but I have a bad habit of trying to create a level of worldbuilding detail that's not sustainable for me to make in a weekly or biweekly campaign. So my next game is going to be in Golarion where most of the legwork is done for me.
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I prefer to run my own settings (and have ran two games of varying lengths in my own settings) but I have a bad habit of trying to create a level of worldbuilding detail that's not sustainable for me to make in a weekly or biweekly campaign. So my next game is going to be in Golarion where most of the legwork is done for me.
This mostly. I love the idea of creating my own world, but it would take much more time and effort then I have to do it the way I would want to.
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90% Golarion with 10% of making stuff work however I wont. I generally use established Golarion lore, but if I dislike something enough I change it, or I might add or change a city to fit the campaign.
I find it a useful tool and guide, rather than a straight jacket.
I'm curious what is so distasteful to the OP that you seem to be advocating against it.
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Golarion is cool and I enjoy reading about it, but I'm way too invested in my worldbuilding as a GM to play in it, we go home setting all the way. I have a partner I Worldbuild with who co-owns the setting, its called "Children of the Wind" and we'll probably make our world anvil for it public and CC when it's reached a point we're satisfied with. Its a little less piecemeal than Golarion (like how different regions of Golarion are for different genres of story?) and is higher concept too-- more of a defined flavor.
Its an age of sail world designed to have countless gods ranging from major to minor who are spirits (anything that would have been considered an outsider in pf1e + dragons and plants) appointed to office by fundamental forces. Gods are very present to the world itself and have divine households that depending on strength range from like 4-16 individuals they can empower. Spirits are created by harvesting the memories and energies produced by the soul during life prior to reincarnation, and so can take on aspects of the dead an such if they produced a large proportion of the energy that makes up a spirit.
Sorcerers have such spirits bound inside them, Orcs are completely rewritten as Onika a fantastical Oni Ancestry, and there are lots of other changes and twists-- it uses Pathfinder 2e pretty raw for all that though, we're consistently using the mechanics as prompts to write new stories around. The setting is also pretty damn 'anime' and embraces the crazier side of the things martials can do by outlining how their training causes them to absorb ambient magic, so its much more Naruto or FFXIV or something in that kind of way than Lord of the Rings.
The name "Children of the Wind" is basically a euphemism the gods use to refer to adventurers, because they blow into town with the wind and leave just as quickly, they're less grounded than other people, queer (our server is very LGBTQ+ inclusive, and queerness as social/ spiritual identity is a major emphasis of mine) individuals who don't really fit in-- Took vibes, for fans of Middle Earth.
Our first campaign was in a homebrew world, but after that campaign ended our GM decided to use Golarion and that the first campaign was set several centuries ago on Golarion. So our version of Golarion has an extra continent wedged between Tian Xia and Arcadia. (We couldn't use Sarusan because the continent of the original campaign connected to a large frozen landmass that seemed to correspond to the Crown of the World.)
Even if I do my own setting work, I do it in the Lost Omens framework. All of my players are somewhat familiar with the lore already so I don't need to do as much re-introducing and refamiliarizing people with the setting. Also I mostly run APs and wouldn't want to port those over to other settings. I like small-scale worldbuilding, but some doing some of the big picture work involving religions, cosmology, and history bores me to tears as a GM so I make campaigns that work with pre-made settings that do a lot of that for me. Lost Omens is the one that my players are familiar with, and one that I like personally as well so it's the one that I use.
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I love the setting and don’t play Pathfinder. Do I win a prize?
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I parted ways with Golarion a long time ago. I've run PF1 campaigns in Kobold Press' Midgard and Frog God Games' Lost Lands. My current PF2 campaigns are set in the Lost Lands.
Oh, man. I would love to see KP give 2e a little bit of love.
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I play a lot of PFS, so that's all set in Golarion.
When I get to choose, though, I make up my own world as often as possible.
Golarion is fine in the context of 6 strangers getting together and solving a premade problem before a gaming store closes in 4 hours. But, it's a weird, eclectic mishmash of different cultures with little coherence. Everyone has their favorite regions and regions they hate, so why have a world that's 90% places you choose not to be?
On top of that, Golarion parallels too closely with Earth. It's restraining to make stuff up about Osirion without drawing on tropes about Egypt or offending someone. Want a storyline about a religious dictator in Osirion, and the heroes leading a revolution? Eek, minefields galore.
World-building isn't as hard as people make it out to be. Using Earth as an inspiration is great - just don't draw all your inspiration from the same place. Like Egyptian pyramids? Cool, me too. Instead of putting them on the northeastern desert country of the south continent and making the pyramids out of sandstone, let's make it a swampy country, and styled like the above-ground cemeteries of New Orleans or the Native American burial mounds. They can be made out of granite, like the Brihadeeswarar Temple. We'll pull a world map from any computer game with a world generator, e.g., Civilization, and refresh until we find a map that we like for a location. Now there's all the flavor of the pyramids that we love without tiptoeing around current events in Egypt.
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My group plays homebrew settings, which was actually one of the reasons we drifted abit from Pathfinder when we learned 2e is going to be heavier in its golarion focus.
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I'm in the homebrew world camp myself. I have spent too much time with my own settings and just can't motivate myself to dig in to the lore of a published universe when I could spend that time evolving my own world instead. But that said, I do like many of the themes and locations in Golarion, and have collected material for some of the locations I like to poach ideas from (especially Osirion, which provides some useful ideas for my predominantly ancient Egyptian-themed PF2E world).
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I play a lot of PFS, so that's all set in Golarion.
When I get to choose, though, I make up my own world as often as possible.
Golarion is fine in the context of 6 strangers getting together and solving a premade problem before a gaming store closes in 4 hours. But, it's a weird, eclectic mishmash of different cultures with little coherence. Everyone has their favorite regions and regions they hate, so why have a world that's 90% places you choose not to be?
On top of that, Golarion parallels too closely with Earth. It's restraining to make stuff up about Osirion without drawing on tropes about Egypt or offending someone. Want a storyline about a religious dictator in Osirion, and the heroes leading a revolution? Eek, minefields galore.
World-building isn't as hard as people make it out to be. Using Earth as an inspiration is great - just don't draw all your inspiration from the same place. Like Egyptian pyramids? Cool, me too. Instead of putting them on the northeastern desert country of the south continent and making the pyramids out of sandstone, let's make it a swampy country, and styled like the above-ground cemeteries of New Orleans or the Native American burial mounds. They can be made out of granite, like the Brihadeeswarar Temple. We'll pull a world map from any computer game with a world generator, e.g., Civilization, and refresh until we find a map that we like for a location. Now there's all the flavor of the pyramids that we love without tiptoeing around current events in Egypt.
I might be missing context here, but I don't think I've run into anyone who would construe current events in Egypt with settings and adventures taking place in an ancient Egyptian-derived setting. There's...a lot...a giant gap, really....between ancient Third Dynasty Egypt, for example, and the politics of today. Worlds apart, almost literally.
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Grew up in the Forgotten Realms, loved Eberron SO much, and have now spent over ten years adventuring in Golarion.
Homebrew settings just never lasted long for us because nobody could enjoy the lore when apart from the table, save the GM.
I might be missing context here, but I don't think I've run into anyone who would construe current events in Egypt with settings and adventures taking place in an ancient Egyptian-derived setting. There's...a lot...a giant gap, really....between ancient Third Dynasty Egypt, for example, and the politics of today. Worlds apart, almost literally.
Okay, how about monkey-people running around Mwangi Expanse, then?
Worldbuilding is hard. Really bad word hard. I pretty much have 1/4th of a world to write and it's still stupid hard to do. I don't blame or shame anyone that uses Golarion for their games.
I personally don't use Golarion because I have my own stories I wanna make that Golarion doesn't play nice with. I do however poach from its deity pool. The inner sea gods in particular are just perfect for general fantasy settings since they hit all the major notes you'd need.
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I have historically only used my own settings, but I've started to change that now. My latest campaign was set in Ustalav, but my own adventure. My next campaign is going to be Strength of Thousands, and I plan on setting things in Golarion for the most part from here on out.
Starfinder was what got me to really consider using the official setting. There's just so much out there that even if I spent all of my free time coming up with more content for my own setting, I would never catch up. It was so cool to be able to say "You start off on this planet, where would you like to go?" and have so many different locations and factions waiting for us to discover together.
Now that PF2 is here, and it's much more accessible for the average person, I've begun introducing even more people to the hobby. With the official setting as my baseline, I can point players at wikis, lore podcasts, and setting books if they want to learn more and get invested. When it's just my world, they can only explore what their characters have found, and that's a slow drip.
To be sure, I still have my own settings swimming around in my head, and I may still play them, but I'll be saving them for the really earth-shaking adventures where I need to have full control over the setting and lore.
Been running Golarion since PF2 release, as I decided to work on a LARGE overhaul of my home setting while updating various things to PF2 mechanics, and getting a better feel for how the system operated before doing too much homebrewing/houserules. In particular, my setting has a different focus on which ancestries are present and are the primary movers of civilization, along with a very large pantheon across the world (though I'm breaking it down into regions to help focus during rework).
While I don't particularly dislike the Golarion setting - part of the fun on the GM side for me is being able to literally make worlds. So my current experience in Golarion is temporary while I try to flesh out and improve the early draft of the setting I was starting to use at the end of PF1 - and set up enough info in website format that players can look into certain info on their own if they want without having to rely on asking the GM about everything.
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I ran a 7 year campaign in Golarion that ended with the party becoming demigods and toppling Razmiran. If I run another Golarion game, it will take place in a continuation of that version of Golarion.
I enjoy watching the PCs change the world.
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My Friends and Family group have been playing in our homebrew world for a really long time. I say our because they have changed and altered my world with their actions (I had to redo the world map thanks to my players!) so its more of our world than just mine now days :)
I know our world like the back of my hand. I don't have to look up what this or that area of the world is like or what faction controls this spot. I just know. That's the benefit of world building for years and not using a pre-packaged world like Golarion.
I still get the setting books for because they do have archetypes, ancestries, items, spells, etc... I can borrow & steal from ;) I also have all my Pathfinder 1 books, Ad&d 2d ed books, Earthdawn and a slew of other RPG's that I also steal ideas from all the time! :)
No offense to Paizo but I just like my world better :)
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Grew up in the Forgotten Realms, loved Eberron SO much, and have now spent over ten years adventuring in Golarion.
Homebrew settings just never lasted long for us because nobody could enjoy the lore when apart from the table, save the GM.
Have you seen the new stuff coming out for Eberron? Keith is doing amazing material!
I have runed my home-setting and never used Golarion. Then I decided to rewrite my setting, and unintentionally crafted something so different and strange than the original which couldn't fit Pathfinder 2e. Now I am half lost in making a system which would be the setting.
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Have you seen the new stuff coming out for Eberron? Keith is doing amazing material!Grew up in the Forgotten Realms, loved Eberron SO much, and have now spent over ten years adventuring in Golarion.
Homebrew settings just never lasted long for us because nobody could enjoy the lore when apart from the table, save the GM.
Nope. I've been out of the Eberron loop since the D&D 3.5 days.
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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
I play a lot of PFS, so that's all set in Golarion.
When I get to choose, though, I make up my own world as often as possible.
Golarion is fine in the context of 6 strangers getting together and solving a premade problem before a gaming store closes in 4 hours. But, it's a weird, eclectic mishmash of different cultures with little coherence. Everyone has their favorite regions and regions they hate, so why have a world that's 90% places you choose not to be?
On top of that, Golarion parallels too closely with Earth. It's restraining to make stuff up about Osirion without drawing on tropes about Egypt or offending someone. Want a storyline about a religious dictator in Osirion, and the heroes leading a revolution? Eek, minefields galore.
World-building isn't as hard as people make it out to be. Using Earth as an inspiration is great - just don't draw all your inspiration from the same place. Like Egyptian pyramids? Cool, me too. Instead of putting them on the northeastern desert country of the south continent and making the pyramids out of sandstone, let's make it a swampy country, and styled like the above-ground cemeteries of New Orleans or the Native American burial mounds. They can be made out of granite, like the Brihadeeswarar Temple. We'll pull a world map from any computer game with a world generator, e.g., Civilization, and refresh until we find a map that we like for a location. Now there's all the flavor of the pyramids that we love without tiptoeing around current events in Egypt.
I find a lot of Avistan boring, but inoffensive; Osirion I want to rewrite so completely nothing remains.
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Nope. I've been out of the Eberron loop since the D&D 3.5 days.Have you seen the new stuff coming out for Eberron? Keith is doing amazing material!Grew up in the Forgotten Realms, loved Eberron SO much, and have now spent over ten years adventuring in Golarion.
Homebrew settings just never lasted long for us because nobody could enjoy the lore when apart from the table, save the GM.
Exploring Eberron is a big lore expansion, including setting the record straight on religions, finally detailing the planes, fleshing out the dwarves, and touching on the sahuagin empire, among other things. He has two more books coming up: a book on the capital of Cyre as a domain of dread, and a city supplement set in a frontier town between Breland and Droaam.
It’s kind of a golden age!
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Umm, I avoided taking part in previous conversation because I didn't want this thread to derail to be about "what parts of golarion we like or don't like". So please, do avoid making thread go off topic too much ^_^;
Otherwise it will be free for all and I'll be like "so you single out chara-kau out of all cool things in Mwangi expanse?" and then there will never be end of it D: (that and I do like ancient egyptian gods in Golarion x'D See already derail is starting aaaah)
Anyhoo, back on topic: I kinda prefer to leave most of my world building to writing stories, but I would like to run more homebrew campaigns if I could. I don't want to stop using official settings though, I've put too much effort into mastering the lore if I didn't like the official settings ;D
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Nope. I've been out of the Eberron loop since the D&D 3.5 days.
LOL I got you beat! I'm up to the 4e books. ;)
Exploring Eberron is a big lore expansion, including setting the record straight on religions, finally detailing the planes, fleshing out the dwarves, and touching on the sahuagin empire, among other things. He has two more books coming up: a book on the capital of Cyre as a domain of dread, and a city supplement set in a frontier town between Breland and Droaam.
It’s kind of a golden age!
That's 5e right? I couldn't bring myself to buy a 5e book... Maybe if I could read it for free but the local bookstore. ;)
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My policy is to use established settings to do all the heavy lifting of world building and sneak in whatever homebrew I want fluff wise when the muses strike. Established settings are skeletons to ease a dms writing burdens, but you're always free to slap more meat on those bones!! That was how I ran my eberron campaign. The Brelish Better Business Bureau is still one of my favorite parts from that campaign and it was adhoc. Long story short, I use Golarion.
I still get the setting books for because they do have archetypes, ancestries, items, spells, etc... I can borrow & steal from ;) I also have all my Pathfinder 1 books, Ad&d 2d ed books, Earthdawn and a slew of other RPG's that I also steal ideas from all the time! :)
Agreed, stealing/modifying stuff from setting books is great! I remember the entire reason I originally bought Inner Sea Gods was to take inspiration from paizo stuff while starting to craft my own Pantheon.
On sidenote, mapping is paaaaaaaaaaaaaain. I do like both world building and improvisation, but making world maps is paaaaaaaaaain xD
Urg, I wish I could disagree, but I suck with any type of drawing and am not that good with any image editing software more complex than MS Paint. I still have a rough map I made in the free version of Inkarnate over a year ago, where I like parts of it but want to drastically change other bits. Still have yet to actually update anything and am somewhat unsure of the best way to do so.
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That seems trivially easy to accomplish considering we have alchemist and inventor as official classes.I run games in the core setting. I mostly play adventure paths. I'm a bit of a Golarion geek.
I play in one game set in the Forgotten Realms. And I daydream that someday I can play in a PF2 game set in Eberron.
Oh, I definitely agree. Those fit the Eberron flavor so well. It's mostly a matter of getting active participants. I have a hard time getting people as excited about it as I am. But I still have it in the back of my mind.
God pf2 would work so well for Eberron. Just the concept of Dragon marks in a system with ancestry feats built in...
Bro, I know, right?!
As soon as I got the Lost Omens player guide and started looking at all the arcane tattoos and what not, I immediately started thinking of how perfect those would make as Dragonmarks.
Me and 2 other people all made a homebrew world that took heavy initial influence from Golarian and then has mutated into it's own beast by this point. We have our own custom (big) pantheon, several continents that are rather fleshed out (some more than others), and a few long running factions. But when the players stumble on something that hasn't been written yet, we'll just go with what Golarian does until we write out something for that ourselves. It's fun making a world from scratch, but dang Paizo has done a lot of good work, and Golarian is super fun to play in. It's just more fun to cook your own food, if that makes sense.
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Oh, I personally love Golarion! I have such an emotional attachment to it — it’s almost absurd, really. Like, don’t get me wrong: For over the years, Paizo has given me such incredible moments with their ludic systems, and this edition in particular is so unapologetically fun and all, but, hmm… The level of attachment that I have for the games themselves are really not on the same level as it is with the settings; specifically, in this case, Golarion.
And I’m not even sure why, really, it’s… Hard for me to put it into words. But I’ll try!
I guess my relationship with the setting started in my late teens. I already played RPGs, but I was pretty… Hmm, how can I say this? Well, I really liked World of Darkness. I liked the edge, I liked the trench coats, that kind of stuff. So, in that sense, I wasn’t really into fantasy. But a friend of mine really wanted to play Pathfinder and he just shoved the World Guide book on my hands and said something like “Give it a read and make a fun character”. That game never happened, but I remember stopping at Cheliax and just… Falling in love with its potential. “The biggest nation of the world is a nation of devil-worshipping ruthless guys? How cool is that?!” lmao I guess I had the impression that in fantasy settings, the biggest guys were always the good guys, but that didn’t feel like the case there. And from there, I started just… Consuming a lot of the setting, passively. My first ever game ran started with the players, being bounty hunters, going after a bandit. They were from Andoran, but had to cross the border to Cheliax, and oh boy did I amp up the angst while they were there.
Thankfully, I too grew out of my teens. After I started college, I met a group of people that played a lot of 3.5 and they were interested in trying Pathfinder — I remember pulling the list of APs from the wiki, reading their premises out loud, and asking in which they were the most interested. They chose Second Darkness, and I just went with it because why not! Hahaha. We had tons of fun times, but between the weird thematic turns, the fact that the adventure is actually set on 3.5, people getting busy because college and etc, after three years we got into the last book and… I don’t know. I just didn’t want to keep going.
We swapped to Rise, with me as a player, and it was tons of fun as well. Being a player again after so much time really gave me a lot of insight. Do you guys know how people say that every player should try to GM once, to foster more empathy and understanding? I genuinely consider the same thing for forever GMs like I was; it helps a lot to analyze your shortcomings as a GM.
Unfortunately, I, well, finished college and had to move out of the town because life. I just assumed we’d keep playing online, but the group actually preferred not to. Pretty low blow, not going to lie, especially because we were pretty tight friends. And after I left, well… The game just fell down as well. Meeting for drinks the last time that the GM was around here, he mentioned that my character was the one closest to all of the rest, and I also helped a lot with off-player duty(loot calculations, hyping games up, interacting with all the characters, suggesting passive player to use their abilities to put them in the spotlight, etc), which is too bad because that game was really great…
And then this last two years I dipped my toes in a bazillion of games with the 2e. I eventually met a group where we swap GM seats and games, playing short (homebrew) campaigns with all sorts of different systems, which I love, and been in and out of many other different 2E groups. I decided to give a try and GM a homebrew adventure — with Pathfinder, I always stuck to APs — and much like a friend did once, I just threw a die so it could pick for me where it would be set. It fell on Osirion! Since then, I’ve managed to snatch a few players and have been narrating a veeeeery cool campaign in there. Like many people already said, there’s a good few stereotypical problems in the region: It’s essentially fantasy Egypt. Buuuut: There’s also plenty of wealth of information? Like there’s so many dots in the maps with so many hooks in each of the description of these locations, I dunno. It’s been really fun.
Well, yeah. Sorry for the whole gigantic post thing, I just got really excited about the topic, hahaha. I guess, in retrospective, my appreciation for Golarion can be chalked up to the fact that I, well, grew with it? But I don't think it's just there. There's a lot of growing love in the writing, a lot of considerations about real life people, a lot of interesting hooks, colorful places, I just... I don't know. It feels special, compared to other "generic" fantasy settings. It’s really gotten to a point where I’m not really amped to play in a “medieval” fantasy setting unless it’s set there, or unless whatever game we’re going to play on has a very different premise(Burning Wheel with its different mechanics, Warhammer Fantasy with its very different setting… Which I’m not the biggest fan of, but it’s a good enough example) lol.
Plus as a GM what I really like to do is tell stories, not create a world. Which totally is a matter of preference, obviously!
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I tend to use premade worlds for sandbox-style campaigns where I expect the players to have a strong desire to roam. I tend to play these as poke the party and see which way they run style games. If I run one of these in a homebrew setting it's rarely detailed at the start and players are free to fill in details for almost anything.
For more location-based games I'll usually design the immediate area and core hook, have the players make characters, make some tweaks based on what my players are asking for, and then backfill the details of the location as needed while slowly working on places that I might expect the players to go later. I tend to be a pretty spontaneous GM rather than the spend weeks/months planning and making maps type. As long as I take notes at the table and keep a few spare NPCs and encounters up my sleeve I can almost always run a fun game late into the night, though there are nights when I have to stop a session early due to players moving through content more quickly than expected.
There are also pure hack and slash games, but those take the least prep and can usually just be done with a combat grid, Monster Manual, and my knowledge of the party.
If I died and were reincarnated as an isekai character in a fantasy realm, it would probably be Golarion.
There's just so many smurfing types of areas to explore, all with their unique themes, I would never truly get bored. XD