Tar-Baphon name

[Kavlor]

Maybe stupid and already answered question, but why exactly Tar-Baphon named this way and what it means? As we know, he is a varisian necromancer from early history of Avistan. His name have part "Tar" which meaning I doesn't know, but it also used by dwarves in their states Tar Taargadth and Tar Khadurrm and seems to mean something like Empire, since other words in this names are modified names of founder of this states. So... why Tar-Baphon used dwarven word to name himself? I know, this is strage question that seems doesn't interest anyone besides me, but I wanna know answer.

[James Jacobs]

As far as I know, "Tar" is neither a reference to the English word for the stuff in the pits at La Brea, CA, nor a reference to the dwarven word. In fact, the name and character were made up years before Pathfinder was even a thing, as one of the antagonists for our non-D&D generic OGL "Compleate Encounters" back when we were doing the D&D magazines.

AKA: "Tar" is just a coincidence here.

[Kavlor]

Thanks for answer. Well, sad to know it's just coincedence. It could be some connection to early Tar-Baphon life, maybe contacts with Janderhoff or Kraggodan dwarves, since they relatively close.

Also... still wondering how there is like 20 years of PF as setting, but we still doens't know almost nothing about Janderhoff, when it's one of five most important varisian cities and one of surviving Skycitadels

[James Jacobs]

Kavlor wrote:

Thanks for answer. Well, sad to know it's just coincedence. It could be some connection to early Tar-Baphon life, maybe contacts with Janderhoff or Kraggodan dwarves, since they relatively close.

Also... still wondering how there is like 20 years of PF as setting, but we still doens't know almost nothing about Janderhoff, when it's one of five most important varisian cities and one of surviving Skycitadels

The simple answer for Janderhoff is that we can't do everything, and we create more content than we could possibly ever detail.

That said...

Spoiler:

When we first started working on Rise of the Runelords a few years before the Pathfinder RPG game came out, we didn't really have a setting yet. While Erik and Jason and a few others started work on the first Gazetteer of the campaign setting, I had to build Varisia up from scratch to give the first three Adventure Paths a setting to live in. The transport of Varisia into the rest of the setting happened later once the Gazetteer book was being finalized.

In that time, I had pretty much no time to do much world creation stuff, so I used a LOT of my homebrew content to save time (including a lot of deities). Some of that stuff came over from my homebrew intact, such as Treerazer. Some came through with some adjustments, like with Karzoug and Magnimar and Korvosa and Alaznist. Some came through just in name only—that's where Janderhoff came from.

Varisia, at that point early in the game, could have ended up the ONLY thing we did for the setting if Pathfinder's Adventure Path didn't take off, so I approached it with the idea that "everything has to be in there for the core game experience." That meant that there needed to be a "homeland" for the core ancestries, and the word "Janderhoff" sounded dwarfy to me at the time so I pulled it out of my homebrew and plopped it in there.

Since Varisia and the rest of the world were developed largely in parallel, this ended up with Janderhoff taking it's time to be officially recognized as one of the Sky Citadels, by the way.

In any case, in my homebrew, Janderhoff was the largest state in a nation called Aratut, and was a pretty diverse place with elves, halflings, giants, and humans living together in semi-harmony as a result of the nation having a lot of militia training to help protect them from the goblins that lived in adjoining Lurkwood. So... not a lot of dwarf stuff there either.