So I've been reading the assorted rulebooks and skimming through AoN for several months now and it feels like there's a dearth of worldbuilding tools available out of the box for Pathfinder 2e. Is there simply no market for those kinds of GM tools anymore (i.e., the expectation is that we don't world-build)? Are some coming down the line? Or is there an expectation that folks will supplement using choice resources from 1st and/or 2nd edition AD&D? (I mention those two specifically because it seems like worldbuilding tools for GMs have been on the wain since the late '90s across most TTRPGs.)
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
I know I would love to see a detailed weather/season system for Golarion. Where each nation or region with in a nation had random weather tables based on the season.
I see there are weather hazards in the Kingmaker adventure path. Hopefully those might get reprinted in a non-adventure path rulebook. However, you can probably use the existing maps to work out what the weather patterns should look like. Consider how the prevailing winds work on Earth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevailing_winds). Typically winds run in one direction across the equator and in opposite directions at the poles with some swirling in between. These winds, along with winter/summer cycles (i.e., solar heating) run the weather. On Earth this typically plays out as mostly wet in the winter months (whichever ones those are for you) and mostly dry in the summer months (ditto). You then make exceptions as you like, dryer across the board some years and wetter across the board in other years.
Regarding use of weather as a hazard for the PC's, I'd push it into my random encounter table (if you use such a thing). E.g., [off the top of my head]:
2 - Celestial|Fiend|Monitor
3 - Astral|Elemental
4 - Ooze
5 - Disease|Hazard
6 - Beast
7 - Animal
8 - Beast
9 - Animal
10 - Disease
11 - Hazard
12 - Plant|Fungus
13 - Humanoid
14 - Giant
15 - Humanoid
16 - Giant
17 - Plant|Fungus
18 - Fey
19 - Ethereal|Spirit|Undead
20 - Dragon
If you wanted to showcase the extraordinary rather than the ordinary, you could invert this table.
There's a Weather Generator in the Paizo store. I've used it in the past to create a week of weather for an overland trek.
Dodeca Weather Generator.
The Gamemastery Guide has an 8-page section on Worldbuilding. And just about any world-building guide for novelists, especially science fiction writers, would be useful in creating you own personal world.
Because Golarion is explicitly modeled on the Earth, most geographical world building would simply follow earth geography/geology. In other words, don't have your rivers start in the lowlands and run up and over a mountain range.
What is it that you need help imagining?
I imagine you're looking for things to help them build their own worlds, not Golarion? I feel like paizo is unlikely to put too many resources towards that.
Jacob Jett wrote: So I've been reading the assorted rulebooks and skimming through AoN for several months now and it feels like there's a dearth of worldbuilding tools available out of the box for Pathfinder 2e. Is there simply no market for those kinds of GM tools anymore (i.e., the expectation is that we don't world-build)? Are some coming down the line? Or is there an expectation that folks will supplement using choice resources from 1st and/or 2nd edition AD&D? (I mention those two specifically because it seems like worldbuilding tools for GMs have been on the wain since the late '90s across most TTRPGs.) I kinda doubt we'll see any of the tools you're looking for from paizo. I've been working to port my campaign world to 2e for a while now but its slow going making sure I ge the key NPCs right. Most of the world's physical stuff like calendar, religions, pantheons, maps, etc etc are all pretty much set. I've been using the same world since Runequest 2.
What kind of tools are you looking for? Be specific. I might be able to point you towards some online resources I've found helpful.
Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber
Without getting more details from the OP, it sounds like a job for the Gamemastery Guide to me. Rather a lot of that falls under a certain definition of world building.
Sadly, I found the Gamemastery Guide rather lacking. 8 pages on world building doesn't really equip folks new to world building for world building. (The tables listing trade goods are particularly lacking.) And while world-building guides for authors are useful tools, there's a definite lack of useful tables without one getting copies of things like the 1st Ed. AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, the 2nd Ed. AD&D World Builder's Guidebook, etc. For the record though, I'm not asking because I need such a thing but because I see a potential niche for something I'm thinking about self-publishing through the Pathfinder Infinite platform (assuming I can work through the Byzantine OGL's gotchas and people are actually willing to spend money on a manuscript that would have little to no illustrations).
An observation of mine is that the basic advice on how to develop your campaign setting's economics, trade, and similar interactive systems is both too abstract and under-developed, which has the effect of making the downtown portion of the game less interesting for characters who are not actively engaged in crafting, performing, or sage-work. There also seems to a dearth of advice of how to increase the social responsibilities of the players as the increase in level. (And this has implications for at least two other conversations taking place in the General Discussion vis-a-vis martial vs. caster power.)
I've been DMing for more than 31 years and because of the satanic panic in the 80s, I've been writing game mechanics for more than 36 years (but that's really another story for another time). Mostly I'm trying to gauge if the niche is large enough that the 3rd party book on world-building for TTRPGs generally, using PF2 as an exemplar, would find its market.
Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber
Seems like a niche, but I'm not sure if there's a demand. What you're talking about feels a little bit irrelevant to the game aspect of TTRPGs. Most people don't care that much about the economy and trade of the world, so I wouldn't expect it to sell much. But hey, prove me wrong!
It doesn't sound like your target audience would be actively reading and responding to posts in a world-specific fan forum.
You might try writing the chapter that you feel most passionately about, and trying to sell it on Pathfinder Infinite. That would probably give you much better data about how much demand there is for such a book.
Milo v3 wrote: I imagine you're looking for things to help them build their own worlds, not Golarion? I feel like paizo is unlikely to put too many resources towards that. Several third-party companies have published world-building materials. For example, my wife gave me The Red Dragon Inn Guide to Inns and Taverns for my birthday in 2016. It is about building and roleplaying inns and taverns. Adapting the book to PF2 would require converting some prices, but innkeeper NPCs don't really need full stat blocks.
A few months later, the party in my PF1 Iron Gods campaign traveled a hundred miles across territory described solely as:
Lords of Rust, page 8 wrote: It’s a 105 mile journey northeast directly from Torch to Scrapwall. The PCs can instead take a longer but safer journey down the Seven Tears River and then up the Sellen River, of course. In the end, the exact route they take to Aldronard’s Grave and Scrapwall is irrelevant. If you wish to add more encounters or wandering monsters along the way, Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Numeria, Land of Fallen Stars contains more information about the lands the PCs must cross through on this journey. They chose the land route and I put a quaint inn in their path for their overnight stay. Then they had to camp in the grassy open plains. After that, they found a riverside port with a bustling tavern where they could hire a boat to cross the Sellen River. I think they preferred conversation with NPCs over dinner more than fighting wandering monsters (I did throw in some wandering monsters which they easily avoided in the open plains), because they still prefer to roleplay journeys instead of just jumping a hundred miles with no story.
PF2 could use supplemental settlement-building materials for Golarion itself because my players often care about details that are not in the adventure path modules. In Assault on Longshadow in my PF2-converted Ironfang Invasion campaign, three of the seven PCs had Underworld Lore due to Detective and Criminal backgrounds, so they wanted to contact the underworld in the city of Longshadow. Thurston Hillman's article on Longshadow in the back of the module mentioned two smugglers and I had to extrapolate the entire underworld from them.
Later as my players learned more about the anarchic government of Nirmathas, they wondered what was being smuggled in a city with no tariffs or contraband. Mostly stolen goods were smuggled to other towns for safer resale. I had to invent that detail myself. The contradiction between the maps and descriptions fot the Marideth River was a more difficult conundrum: River Shipping from Longshadow. I had to invent a canal with locks to solve that one.
PF1 has business-building material in Ultimate Campaign. I made good use of it in my Iron Gods campaign when the PCs established businesses in their base town Torch. I also build a black market with the rules in Pathfinder Player Companion: Black Markets. My players love this stuff.
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