Cheliax Infernal Inheritance complaint

[Mammoth Daddy]

Hello,

I keep hearing from those that bought Cheliax Infernal Inheritance that there are numerous editorial mistakes and I am concerned since I am planning on buying the Lost Omens Saga Lands book. There's like an entire section on Upper and Lower Macini where the writers clearly didn't coordinate at all nor explain that it was a city divided by a border. Then there's an entre section that's supposed to be about goblins but it's about gnomes instead. What gives? Why is editing always Paizo's Achilles Heel?? I'm frustrated that this is still a problem ten years later after people keep hounding ya'll about it.

[QuidEst]

Until I see the book, I'm going to assume that it's "an entire section on gnomes that was mislabeled as goblins". That's a much easier mistake to make, and the Old Cheliax region does have some notable gnome settlements if I recall correctly.

I think that some amount of editing issues are just part and parcel with these books not costing twice as much and coming out half as often. Paizo has to have different parts of the writing done by different people, including freelancers. Coordinating them just isn't always feasible. Editing catches a lot of stuff, but obviously we only ever see the parts that slip through the cracks.

I don't know what you actually expect to be able to completely fix this in ten years. Hire three times as many editors? Paizo was forced to let people go recently because of the Diamond distributor expenses. Not release books until they've had more passes? They've already slowed down the unsustainable PF1 release schedule and moved to larger books at a slower pace.

This book might have run into more issues than usual because of everything going on. To me, the issues don't really sound like a reason to not buy it. I'm interested in the art, Nidal lore, and options, and some inconsistency around Cheliax's changing borders isn't going to interfere with that.

[0xTJ]

QuidEst wrote:

Until I see the book, I'm going to assume that it's "an entire section on gnomes that was mislabeled as goblins". That's a much easier mistake to make, and the Old Cheliax region does have some notable gnome settlements if I recall correctly.

I think that some amount of editing issues are just part and parcel with these books not costing twice as much and coming out half as often. Paizo has to have different parts of the writing done by different people, including freelancers. Coordinating them just isn't always feasible. Editing catches a lot of stuff, but obviously we only ever see the parts that slip through the cracks.

I don't know what you actually expect to be able to completely fix this in ten years. Hire three times as many editors? Paizo was forced to let people go recently because of the Diamond distributor expenses. Not release books until they've had more passes? They've already slowed down the unsustainable PF1 release schedule and moved to larger books at a slower pace.

This book might have run into more issues than usual because of everything going on. To me, the issues don't really sound like a reason to not buy it. I'm interested in the art, Nidal lore, and options, and some inconsistency around Cheliax's changing borders isn't going to interfere with that.

I initially didn't find it, gnomes don't really come up that much other than one settlement and a handful of named characters. After some searching, I found a Reddit comment that seems to be the source. (As that comment says), it isn't "an entire section", but just one paragraph. The Goblins section comes right after Gnomes, and it seems that the first printed paragraph of Goblins was meant to be in the Gnomes section instead.

It does seem to be a genuine issue unrelated to having multiple writers (it seems more like a copy-paste mistake).

For the Macini issue, I don't think it's too hard to brush it aside as "from the Cheliax perspective, it is Macini" (though since this is a lore section it should present accurate information). The Macini entry does leave out any reference of Lower Macini but that doesn't make it completely wrong, just misleading and incomplete. This one seems like the missed coordination between writers that didn't get caught in editing, like you describe.

More Macini:

It's also not correct to say that the book doesn't explain that the city is divided. It does, they explain why and in what way; it's just that this is only done on the Upper Macini side, with the other (Macini) entry ignoring the division.

I agree that, for both of these issues, these aren't deal-breakers at all. They don't look great, but there's just a lot of lore, past and new. I prefer these minor mistakes to more significant contradictions. I personally don't see them as remotely justifying not purchasing the books (though I hope they don't get worse, because that could start hurting Paizo's reputation).

I am particularly looking forward to Unseen World, and have high hopes for it. I like all world-building, but prefer the weirder stuff to politics (not that I don't also buy the politics books).

[The Raven Black]

I agree that the loss of so many coworkers must have had an impact here.

[Moth Mariner]

https://paizo.com/threads/rzs8qndn?Cheliax-Infernal-Inheritance-issues
The thread going into (possibly inspiring?) the above, hopefully a little clearer.

Fairly limited number of things spotted so far, and definitely not detracting from the rest of the book, but it does make working on the wiki a little more challenging when the same city is apparently in two different countries ;-;