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Now that we've been teased with the three totally brand new Ancestries appearing in the Tian Xia Character Guide*, I figured this was good a time as any to talk about whether any of the new ancestries might retroactively belong in Willowshore. Obviously, Shenmen and by extension Willowshore seems to be a place which leans more heavily on Chinese and Japanese horror tropes, but naturally a variety of influences are seen in the town.
*For those who haven't seen the stream: Sarangay, bovids inspired by Filipino myth; Yaksha, from Indian/South Asian myth; and Yaoguai, i.e. an ancestry that covers the common trope of 'this person was an animal/rock/tree and they became more humanoid when they gained power/sapience/enlightenment, such as the infamous Sun Wukong who is actually as much an example of a stone gaining sapience as he is a monkey).
The yaksha I expect to be more tied to regions where rakshasa are more prevalent and where Hindu influences are more apparent, so I don't imagine they'll necessarily be most on-theme for this AP, but it seems like unless yaoguai are particularly uncommon across Tian Xia, one or more would fit in only too well. Perhaps would anyone consider replacing one of the various NPCs around town with a yaoguai? Anyone have plans to make a yaoguai character?
I don't know if the sarangay are going to be associated with particular regions of Tian Xia, but I can see them fitting in happily. I don't know Tian Xia well enough to know which nations are more tied to Filipino inspirations, but judging by Shenmen's position next to water and central in the continent, I don't expect it to be a prohibitively far walk.
Anyone else excited by the new ancestries and planning to find a place for them in their Willowshore in some way or another? Or planning to bring one to the table when it's time for the summer festival?
Now that you mention it, it is a pretty oddly human-centric town considering how highly cosmopolitan PF is. I mean, I get it - this AP is inspired by folklore rather than high fantasy, and nearly all protagonists in folklore and fairytale are human. But still, I think every NPC is human, or human-seeming, except for maybe a single leshy.
Would it have been too difficult to have, say, a third of the town kitsune, yaksha, or even, I don't know, ratfolk? Or a combination of these? Particularly considering how it takes place just after a festival, and they bring in people from all over the place?
But hey, I'm no PF2 lore writer. Maybe it would have been too difficult for reasons I am unaware of.
That said, one thing that can be helpful with the "all one species (human) setting" is that it is super easy to change to all another ancestry. You could easily make this a dwarven, grippili, or <insert whatever ancestry the PCs would like to play> settlement. Or just swap in the ancestry mix that makes sense for the world you run I guess.
As to yaoguai, if any of your players happen to read this AP you could insist they play one. Called, perhaps, "UC". Who was once maybe, I don't know, a guardian statue until something strange happened and they "woke up". They know what is going on but can't tell anyone for fear that... well. Reasons. ;)
If I was a player I would want to play a minotaur so it's sarangay all the way.
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I suppose it depends if you consider elves and kitsune as 'human seeming' but there's I think at least 2-3 named NPCs of each in town, a couple halflings, a tengu, and one named ratfolk. The town is definitely mostly human, it's true, but my own limited experience is that this is often the case especially in small town stats. Willowshore excites me because it does include a variety of important non-humans, even if it's still a majority human town--and the diversity of those humans, at least judging by the names (I haven't taken a roster of the human ethnicities mentioned yet) has delighted me, too.
This is not to say that the diversity of the town couldn't be seriously turned up to suit a group's tastes, of course! I find myself kind of liking the explanation for the random elf population, but even still I wonder if it wouldn't be interesting to replace every elf with another long-lived ancestry--like perhaps yaoguai can live to be hundreds of years old and ended up populating a chunk of the town? Only thing is deciding what to do with half-elves for these purposes.
EDIT: Actually, dialing in on that idea a bit, its just idle pondering but I think that the most obvious answer for yaoguai-ing the elves would be making them like something like a band of heavenly spiders who watched over the town in early days... partly just because I want to give the players a reason to expect that spider-themed things in this town aren't inherently demonic--and course to play off of UC when they come up.
Creative Director
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One of the frustrating parts about writing and developing Season of Ghosts is how the OGL crisis forced us to reschedule the Tian Xia books—we couldn't push back the Adventure Path volumes because they're attached to a rigid monthly schedule and also the team that works on Adventure Paths is not the same team who works on the rule and lore books. So in order for us to have capacity to create and release the remastered books in the same year that the OGL crisis happened, we had to push back other products in the Rules and Lore line. That meant that work had to stop on those while that team worked on the Remastered rules. And we on the Narrative team had to keep going without those resources for most of the year. (Incidentally, this is the same reason we weren't able to switch our adventures over to remastered rules day and date with the rulebook releases, but had to wait about half a year to do so.)
That's a big part as to why Willowshore is humanocentric, but don't forget that Pathfinder itself is too. One of the big differences between the Pathfinder and Starfinder settings is that Starfinder is MUCH less humanocentric. While we DO have a lot of ancestries for players to choose from, there are a lot of regions in Golarion where ancestry diversity isn't all-encompasing. That is intentional.
It's also a reflection of my preference, to be honest. I much prefer fantasy settings to be more focused on humans as the baseline, because to me, that makes the inclusion of non-human elements more fantastic and magical. It helps keep the wide range of options feeling more exciting and interesting, but at the same time, there's a HUGE amount of diversity among humanity, and by focusing on humans as the baseline we get to explore that real-world diversity in a better way.
Feel free to adjust the ancestries of Willowshore's residents as you wish in your game. If you have a player who wants to play an ancestry that's not represented in the town's NPCs, it can be a good idea to include some of that ancestry to give that player character some links, but you should also chat with that player. I suspect that there's a fair amount of players who like playing more obscure or uncommon/rare ancestries BECAUSE those players want to play the unusual and strange and fish-out-of-water and unique character in the group, and they might not WANT to have others of their ancestry robbing that spotlight from them.
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Feel free to adjust the ancestries of Willowshore's residents as you wish in your game. If you have a player who wants to play an ancestry that's not represented in the town's NPCs, it can be a good idea to include some of that ancestry to give that player character some links, but you should also chat with that player. I suspect that there's a fair amount of players who like playing more obscure or uncommon/rare ancestries BECAUSE those players want to play the unusual and strange and fish-out-of-water and unique character in the group, and they might not WANT to have others of their ancestry robbing that spotlight from them.
Ah, yes, this is also valid. Sometimes you absolutely need to play the character whose very appearance invites interest and confusion because what manner of creature is this and where do you come from? Definitely before I make any changes I'd want to check if any of my players were interested in thing their backstory to the elf presence in town, or if anyone was looking to be a standout monkey king yaoguai who happens to live in town.
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Putting aside my xenofiction preferences for now, one of things I do like about Pathfinder is that despite it being human centric setting, its not "Humans are more special than other species and thus its their destiny to rule the world" like how lot of settings end up implying accidentally :p
(admittedly there might have been flavor of something like that in early pathfinder with aboleths and azlanti hype, but ever since of 2e, its felt like other species are taken seriously as part of setting rather than just rare player character options that occasionally appear as npcs)