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I think my main advice is to stop making more work for yourself than you need to.
Like I don't really understand why you think you need to sort through every individual spell in PF2 but not in 5e. You mentioned sorting by schools of magic or type of spell list (though primal isn't even a thing in 5e...) so why couldn't you do that with PF2's spell traditions or leave it more open ended in categorization? It feels like you've created very different standards for both systems, the solution is to just not do that.
So, again I ask - what do other Pathfinder GMs tend to do?
I've been struggling to answer this question because I feel like it keeps coming back to a really unsatisfying one: pretty much nothing.
Like if I'm playing PF2 in one of my homebrew settings I just... play PF2 in that homebrew setting. There's very little that requires some Golarian setting conceit to work, and most of what does can just be kind of handwaved (like the various setting specific options in 5e).
The two big ones are deities and whether you want sanctification to be a thing or turn it off. I find it to be pretty easy to just disable or enable the latter without much and for the former... if someone wants to play a Cleric I'll just homebrew something for them (though you could reskin a golarian god if you want it to be easier and one of them happens to be close enough to something in your setting). That admittedly is extra work, but deity statblocks aren't that big either.
If no one is playing a Cleric I do almost zero conversion work unless there's something really specific I want to change for my own reasons (like I've kind of redesigned druids for a thing I'm doing but that's just something I wanted to try not something I feel like is a requirement).
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I truly enjoy Pathfinder as a system. I run it from time to time as a one-shot game here and there. However, I've noticed a real bottleneck in running a full adventure. I'm not very taken with the rather poor quality of the official adventures and adventure paths.
I'm not trying to pick a fight here, but I'm confused by your statement since the official scenarios and adventure paths are a big portion of what keep Paizo running as a business. The "main" books are sellers, but mostly in a burst after release. The continuous release of adventures composes a big portion of sales.
I bring this up to say, could you explain what it is you don't like about official adventure paths and scenarios?
They're not perfect, but my personal experience wouldn't label them as overall "poor quality", so I think I have a very different expectation than you do.
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I have found Paizo's modules to be well written. However, my experience with other companies' modules was mostly from when I was a player rather than a GM. The big exception was Battlezoo's Jewel of the Indigo Isles, which felt much like a Paizo adventure path but more whimsical. When I read old D&D modules--my wife has a collection--they often are a dungeon crawl with no story. I ran two: one as is, and one converted into a PF1 filler session for my wife's Rise of the Runelords campaign when she was out of town.
A Pathfinder 1st Edition game I played at the Family Game Store in Savage, Maryland, was adapted from a published fantasy novel by the GM. I sometimes saw him pull out the novel as a reference, but I never caught the author or title. The novel provided the setting. He used the standard PF1 magic system rather than rewriting the magic rules to fit the novel. The plot, alas, was terribly fragile, because we players did not make the same decisions as the characters in the novel. We had times when the plot stalled, so I or another player had to push forward on our character's own agenda until the game moved into territory where the novel provided guidance again.
Rebuilding Pathfinder's magic system to fit another setting's magic would be like rebuilding the combat system to fit Frank Herbert's Dune series. That series is science fiction, but people fight with swords because they have personal force fields that stop fast-moving projectiles but not slow-moving pointy objects. You would be dumping a lot of rulebook content and replacing it with homebrew. You might as well switch to another roleplaying system that is designed for versatility, such as GURPS. Furthermore, the easy encounter building of PF2 comes from balance, but homebrew takes a lot of work to achieve the same precision of balance. Instead, the easy solution would be to keep Pathfinder's magic, but adjust some cosmetic details to increase the resemblance to the setting's magic. Pathfinder in the Harry Potter universe will have all spellcasters waving wands as they cast spells, but the spells would be the spells from Player Core.
Thus, let's assume that the homebrew campaign keeps the same rules but has different continents, species, cultures, and deities.
Eternarii has just five deities. Okay, clerics have the divine spell list and focus spells based on their god's domains, so pick the domains for those five gods.
The heavy overlap between the four spell traditions, arcane, divine, primal, and occult, does clashes with the magic of your setting. Then drop two and keep the opposites: arcane versus divine or primal versus occult. Opposites are defined by the Four Essences. That would reduce overlap. Forbid the character classes that use the excluded spell traditions or switch them to other traditions.
Want to keep clerics without actual deities? Simply give them religions--and those religions can be philosophies without gods--and their power comes from their spiritual devotion to their faith. A cleric without any religion would be more difficult to homebrew.
I'd absolutely love to run Pathfinder 2e for some of my players, but a big part of my enjoyment is building the worlds and adventures. This is part of how I make the adventure feel unique and interesting. If just really feels like Pathfinder isn't designed for GMs like me.
I run Paizo adventure paths to keep my campaigns more interesting. I am terrible at inventing villains and conflict. My homebrew villains are not sufficiently malicious.
On the other hand, my players love me customizing their adventures to their tastes. On some occasions I have had to rewrite half the content of a module because the party chose a different direction than the module intended. So I do a lot of world building inside Paizo's Golarion setting. For example, I am currently running Strength of Thousands, set at the Magaambya School of Magic. My players wanted to emphasize that their characters are students, so I invented classes and class field trips.
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However, the core maths upon which Pathfinder 2e is based assumes that your players are getting specific amounts of magic items as they level. I don't know if you've ever tried running PF2e in a game where your player characters didn't get magic items at the same rate - it's no fun for anyone because the maths starts to fall apart FAST!
The variant rule of Automatic Bonus Progression covers exactly this.
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That kind of adventure meant sorting spell lists quite easily into the domain of one of 5 deities. Now in other systems that was relatively easy (yes even D&D 5e). In PF2e it's simply not because of the overlap in traditions. You'll note that many spells draw from more than one tradition.
If I get it correctly, you mean to sort spells, rather than spell lists.
In such a case, I would not try to sort ALL spells, but just those that come into play.
Who cares that the "All is One, One is All" spell comes from deity number 3 or number 5 if no one ever uses it in your story ?
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Yeah, sorry Squiggit but that's just not true.
I mean clearly it is, because it's working for fine for other people. It's really not that big of a deal.
That kind of adventure meant sorting spell lists quite easily into the domain of one of 5 deities. Now in other systems that was relatively easy (yes even D&D 5e). In PF2e it's simply not because of the overlap in traditions. You'll note that many spells draw from more than one tradition.
If you're splitting by spell list type, I don't really see a problem in there being some failure in Arcane not causing problems for similar Divine effects (especially since you mentioned splitting things this way in 5e too and 5e also has overlapping spells).
I just don't understand why splitting 5e into arcane/divine/primal make sense but splitting PF2 into arcane/divine/primal/occult doesn't. The former is your own example, so I'm struggling to understand the disconnect.
To some extent I get the hangup, but give how hyper specific both the idea and your required implementation is, I don't think it's super fair to call that a PF2 issue or Paizo's entanglements with Golarion. Just that you build something around 5e's schools of magic and it's not going to work great in any system that doesn't have something similar.
I don't know if you've ever tried running PF2e in a game where your player characters didn't get magic items at the same rate - it's no fun for anyone because the maths starts to fall apart FAST!
Yeah I just use ABP.
That your suggestion is 'stop making more work for yourself' kinda tells me you've probably never really built your own settings from scratch.
Fascinating that you think that! Does assuming I'm incompetent or clueless help any?
The broader point here though is that I think we sometimes underestimate how much we can get stuck in a specific rut and how sometimes hard rules we think exist are just an issue of mind over matter. Looking at your description, I see a lot of really specific rules that relate to how you play 5 that I'm not sure are really necessary for the setting, and part of adaptation if stepping back and re-examining why we make those choices.
Re-categorizing every single spell in PF2 sounds like an obnoxious and terrible amount of work... so me personally I just wouldn't do that unless I was really in the mood for that kind of in depth re-contextualization of the setting, I'd use a different categorization system, like the already existing spell traditions.
On the deity and spell list and "classifying" spells into school/belonging to a deity...
Perhaps it's because I've haven't followed accurately, but this seems like a self inflicted wound.
You create a world in which all magic is derived from deities. (It doesn't need to be this way, for example in the Golarion setting magic [as far as we know] doesn't depend on Nethys like it did on Mystra in other settings). So if I were creating a world in which people were severing the deities from the world, it would sever all magic. Only magic provided by deities, meaning only clerics, champions, etc that directly received power from a deity would be impacted.
I suppose the reason you want to associate spells to a deity is because as a deity is cut off more spells become unavailable?
If I really felt I needed to go through with a setting like this, I'd probably institute some kind of wild magic system (PF2 already has this but I don't think it's called wild magic and I'm forgetting the right term) and instead of saying "oh, because this deity is cut off you lost magic associated with them" I'd instead say "As the magic of the universe tries to correct itself it is fluctuating wildly" and I'd modify the frequency of how often the wildmagic happens and the severity of effects based on how many deities had been cut off.
But if you're really truly dead set on doing it your one way, then yes, the system provided by PF2 doesn't lend itself to that very specific story. I'm not sure that's a failing of the system though.
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I have run Pathfinder in an entirely homebrew world, and while lots of it is actually fairly straightforward, stuff involving Divine magic is one of the pain points. Golarian's setting and the rules around Clerics are intertwined far more heavily than any part of Golarian's setting is with basically any other class. Like, you can drop a Fighter/Bard/Commander/etc into another setting with basically no changes and they will work fine, especially if you disallow uncommon stuff that is Golarian specific (such as Firebrands/Knights of Lastwall/etc feats). But the system is helping you out with that already because those tend to start off uncommon, so they're disallowed by default.
Stuff that touches the Divine is not that, and Cleric is definitely not that. It's significantly more work to make Clerics work. You can either deal with that, change how Clerics work, or decide its not worth the effort and ban the class. (Oracle and Sorcerer are still Divine but are not tied to Golarian's pantheon so directly.)
You know what you're right. I'm somewhat frustrated and I've transferred my feelings about GM Core and Gamemastery Guide over to the adventures. It was unfair. Abomination Vault for example is a pretty decent adventure, as are a few others. They're just not what I have enjoyed running most.
No worries. I think there's just a disconnect here. The adventure paths are generally pretty good, but they're linear. They expect and often require the players to behave a certain way to work. If the players don't do that, problems start.
If part of what you want in a campaign is a more open, sandbox approach, APs will not fit the bill well. More standalone scenarios are better for that since you can more easily repurpose them.
Yeah, sorry Squiggit but that's just not true. Sure, you can very easily plug and play a very basic and generic fantasy world in when playing PF2e. However, in the adventure setting I mentioned earlier the whole aim was to prevent the antagonist group from severing the connections between the mortal realm and the gods. If the antagonists succeeded they'd sever the magic that said deities granted to the mortal realm. That kind of adventure meant sorting spell lists quite easily into the domain of one of 5 deities. Now in other systems that was relatively easy (yes even D&D 5e). In PF2e it's simply not because of the overlap in traditions. You'll note that many spells draw from more than one tradition.
It is that simple if you're going to do it with the way PF2 rules work: the Gods are cut off, all Divine magic ceases to function. That doesn't impact a Wizard casting Fireball, but it does impact a Cleric casting Fireball (who now can't).
This has actually happened in Golarian before, most notably when Aroden and Gorum died: anyone and anything powered by their Divine power stopped doing so.
If you're trying to alter the way magic works in the system entirely so that all magic is granted by the Gods and thus Arcane magic doesn't really exist, that's a very different thing and yeah, a change that drastic is going to require more work because you're working against the system.
But that would be true even if Golarian didn't exist, because that's not a setting thing: that's a core system thing. There's four traditions of magic, and spells can exist in more than one of them. If you're breaking that assumption, you're changing how the rules work, and homebrewing system rules is always harder than changing a setting.
Course, original PF2 had spell schools on every spell just like D&D does, so if you use that version, the schools of magic all exist that you mentioned anyway. Those stopped existing in the remaster because of the OGL situation (thanks Hasbro!).
Even leaving aside my example here. Let's say you want to create a lower magic world. A casual reader of 1e or 2e Gamemastery Guide, or even GM Core would be forgiven for assuming that's pretty simple. It is after all summed up in a single short paragraph. However, the core maths upon which Pathfinder 2e is based assumes that your players are getting specific amounts of magic items as they level. I don't know if you've ever tried running PF2e in a game where your player characters didn't get magic items at the same rate - it's no fun for anyone because the maths starts to fall apart FAST!
Automatic Bonus Progression or the similar Automatic Rune Progression basically cover this. That said, PF2 is not a low magic system and if you really want to run a low magic game, there are better systems to do it with.
You can make a system hack to do it, of course, like Jason Bhulman did with Hellfinder and Hopefinder to change the system into something more suitable for those genres of games.
That your suggestion is 'stop making more work for yourself' kinda tells me you've probably never really built your own settings from scratch. It's something I've done maybe three times over the decades - oddly enough the first was for PF1e when I didn't know any better. The idea in building one's own world really is that once introduced you've got a unique setting. It's easier to maintain any shape of continuity where players actually get to shape and alter the world of which they are a part. I actively want the effort for this, because I want to give my players an environment that draws on their interests the most. Reskinning stuff, isn't something that appeals to me. Which is why I asked for suggestions in the first place.
Yeah, creating your own world is a blast with how you and the players can shape it. We've made that work in our version of Golarian (which differs somewhat from the official version now), but it's easier when you control it.
But if you're going to use a system, the world you build needs to align with the system. If it doesn't, you either need to change the system to make it align, or change the world to make it align. That means you can change your "what happens when the 5 gods are cut off" idea to cause an effect that works more easily in PF2 (like Divine stuff shutting off), which is what I'd do in your case.
Alternately, you need to change PF2 to do what you want it to, which in this case is going to be a lot of work. Changing a ton of core rules also makes using tools harder. Like if you drastically change how magic works, it may be hard for folks to use Pathbuilder, which is a shame since its such a useful player aid.
If you find yourself having to do that too many times, then it suggests to me that maybe PF2 is just the wrong system for the game you want to run and a system where the core rule assumptions better align to your world would be a better fit.
That's always my advice to world builders: find a system that requires you to change as few core rules as possible. Adding/removing classes/feats/items/etc is comparatively easy, but as soon as you start changing rules, things can get messy quickly. Likewise: if you have your heart set on a certain system, align how the world works to match how the system expects things to work so you don't have to change a bunch of rules.
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I truly enjoy Pathfinder as a system. I run it from time to time as a one-shot game here and there. However, I've noticed a real bottleneck in running a full adventure. I'm not very taken with the rather poor quality of the official adventures and adventure paths.
To be clear, I've been running and playing TTRPGs for over two decades at this point. I'm the kind of GM that enjoys crafting a world and an adventure path for players. Compared with adventure paths or campaigns from other systems and other publishers Pathfinder's offerings just seem a lot less engaging and a lot more resistant to alteration by the GM.
So, the truth is that Paizo is an adventure-writing powerhouse, with a huge range of authors, who often share the same APs. Obviously, this creates a huge variety of quality and styles among Paizo's adventures. On this point, I really like Tarondor's analysis of the APs released so far this year. It clearly demonstrates how quality can vary when producing so much material.
As an example, let's take a world I crafted previous - Eternarii. It is a world with just five deities. Magic in this world all ties back to those deities. In 5e it is pretty easy to fit the lore in with the mechanics. Spells, classes and abilties are really well tied into the deities of the world because you've got just the 8 schools of magic or even just the 3 main spell list types (Arcane, Divine, Primal). In PF2e though there is so much overlap between the traditions the task would then necessitate going through every single spell and categorise them individually. With well over 300 in Player Core alone (not including rituals or focus spells) that's a daunting task and before I even get into Player Core 2 or other options.
It isn't so clear like schools was, but PF2e divides spells into 8 concepts in practice. The traditions (divine, occult, primal and arcane) and the essences (Material, Mental, Spiritual and Vital).
The essences aren't so clearly separated like traditions but are a bit easy to understand (the spells that are able to affect the world physically are the material, those who affects the mind are mental, those who affects the spirits/souls are spiritual and those who affects the life/unlife are vital). So if you want to, can make your deities both based in a tradition or in different essences.
GM Core (and Prior Gamemastery Guides) absolutely SUCK for the worldbuilding GMs out there. Want to mess with Deities by removing them entirely? GM Core has zero advice on how to handle Clerics. Should you disallow Clerics? What happens when a cleric acts more in line with their religion's anathema? The 'Building Games' section of GM core is truly badly written because of what is overlooked.
I'd absolutely love to run Pathfinder 2e for some of my players, but a big part of my enjoyment is building the worlds and adventures. This is part of how I make the adventure feel unique and interesting. If just really feels like Pathfinder isn't designed for GMs like me.
So, again I ask - what do other Pathfinder GMs tend to do?
Do you just stick to published adventure paths? Do you do only surface only worldbuilding where you just reskin the existing Golarion stuff? What advice have you folks got for me?
The book that helped me better understand how the system handles deities wasn't GMC, but Divine Mysteries/Gods and Magic. While demonstrating over a hundred deities, it also makes it quite easy to understand how to introduce them through the stat block system. It's basically:
Category: Useful only if you have more than one pantheon operating in different areas of the world/universe and want to organize them separately.
Edicts: Any actions your deity advocates as good practice but doesn't actually require. These are things they follow in their essence and are happy for their devotees to do as well, but understand if they can't do them for any just reason.
Anathemas: Any actions your deity abhors, things unacceptable to them, things they would be disappointed in if their followers sinned unintentionally or did out of a lack of choice, or would abhor if they actively pursued these acts. Areas of Concern: Concepts where the current deity, usually the same number of domains (4).
Religious Symbol: Purely thematic.
Sacred Animal: Purely thematic.
Sacred Color(s): Purely thematic.
Pantheons/Covenants: Allows you to list the deity's pantheons if there is more than one pantheon.
Divine Attribute: Used by some backgrounds such as Raised by Belief.
Divine Font: Harm, Heal, or both, depending on whether the deity aligns with the forces of life, death/undeath, or whether they don't care/seek balance.
Divine Sanctification: Basically, this will define whether your deity will be good (Holy), evil (Unholy), or neutral (none), or whether they don't care (both).
Divine Skill: Same idea as Divine Attribute. Favored Weapon: Your deity's weapon for use by armed divine classes.
Domains: Self-explanatory, usually limited to 4, typically associated with Areas of Concern.
Alternate Domains: 4 more domains for unorthodox devotees to use.
Cleric Spells: 3 or 9 non-divine spells that the deity allows their clerics to use. If the deity is a magic-related deity, there are 9, one for each rank. If the deity is not magic-related, there are only 3, one of 1st rank and two of higher ranks, not duplicated.
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As your world have only few deities and all liked to magic, I recommend putting all 9 Cleric Spells ranks for all your deities.
You should also add more than 4+4 domains for your deities too in order to give all available domains to your players.
As an example, let's take a world I crafted previous - Eternarii. It is a world with just five deities. Magic in this world all ties back to those deities. In 5e it is pretty easy to fit the lore in with the mechanics. Spells, classes and abilties are really well tied into the deities of the world because you've got just the 8 schools of magic or even just the 3 main spell list types (Arcane, Divine, Primal). In PF2e though there is so much overlap between the traditions the task would then necessitate going through every single spell and categorise them individually. With well over 300 in Player Core alone (not including rituals or focus spells) that's a daunting task and before I even get into Player Core 2 or other options.
I'll go with this, since you used it as an example, and I think it's a good one. I don't know what kind of deities you are using, but here are some options.
- OGL magic schools. You mentioned the eight schools of magic, and Pathfinder did have those. In Archives of Nethys, the setting on the top right (paintbrush icon) lets you toggle to tell it to not prefer remaster material. From there, you can search for each school's tag and split out all those spells. For a lower-tech approach, using the Core Rulebook will similarly have them all split out. Obviously, you'll miss out on some more options, but as you mentioned, even one book alone covers a lot of ground.
- Traits. This one is definitely more geared towards Archives of Nethys, but there are plenty of useful traits. Got a god that covers life and death? Void, vitality, Healing, and Death trait spells can all be quickly handed over to them. Because you can build out the query, you can even get a URL at the end of your work that allows you to link each deity's complete spell list if you build them out of traits! It's unlikely to cover everything perfectly, but it's a useful option to have.
- This is a little more specific, but the elements do have dedicated lists, which is a common way to divide things out. If your gods happen to line up with that, it's not hard to go with that.