The more I hear about Golarion the shittier it sounds

It just doesn't seem coherent. There's some elements of it that I really like, like the whole planet being the cage of a giant abomination, but the rest of it borders on "lol randumb!"

What is this, a Golarion for ants?

What is this? A new RPG by Paizo?

The main issue I have with Golarion is that, even more so than Forgotten Realms, it seems to be taking the kitchen sink approach to fantasy. It just throws in as many cliches as possible, along with SJW ethics, and calls itself a setting. That's not a setting; that's just putting special snowflakes on a map.

It's D&D-style kitchen sink fantasy, made more to facilitate a variety of adventures than to actually make any real sense or have a coherent history. I mean, yeah, it's shitty. But it gives them an in-story excuse to add Not!Arabian Nights-flavored stuff and Not!European Gothic Horror stuff in the same books.

Don't think of settings like that as an attempt at world-building. They're not. They're a vehicle through which the developers can add content for a variety of different campaigns. There are a lot of things wrong with Pathfinder, but at least I can understand why they built the setting the way they did. That's a lot more than I can say about their reasoning behind a lot of the game's mechanics. Golarion's uninspired and derivative, sure. But it does what it's supposed to do--or at the least, it's clearly trying.

The more I hear about Faerun the shittier it sounds.

Also Razmiran is Scientologyland.

I think the way Golarion was meant to be used is to pick one specific area that suits your tastes, whatever they are, and keep your campaign centered there - that way you have a bare-bones starting point to build on or alter however you see fit, and can ignore all the rest.

Gnerally speaking the more you learn about any setting the shitteir it is, just because "cool concept with the specifics up to my imagination" will always be cooler to you.

I could not possibly disagree with you more.

The impression I got from my read of the core is that it's entirely devoid of sympathetic characters. Every person worth mentioning is an asshole at best, and every place is a festering shitheap for the population of assholes to live in. There's zero reason to care about whether anyone there lives or dies.

Maybe some people like the world of feces, but I don't find it to make for a very compelling or interesting setting.

With Paizo ever release a thematically focused setting?

Why would they when they could expand the map a tiny bit and shoehorn in another themed country?

Then op can have his "cohesive" worlds and travel between them... Similarly to crossing the borders of these countries.

So like a generic fantasy equivalent to Rifts Earth?

...

Jovial men in a grim dark world is my turn on

There is already a "brief" outline of each planet in the system, Check out "PZO9243 Distant Worlds" if your interested.

But for TLDR purposes in order from the sun.
> The SUN
portals to the plane of fire and its inhabitants abound, one big portal to the positive energy plane at at the center, And one crazy wizard.

>Aballon
Aliens came a mining, left behind citys and sentient robots that are too afraid/reverent to enter them.

>Castrovel
Tropical Jungle world with an even more pretty & smarter than elves race riding giant lizards

>Golarion
where everything actually happens

>Akiton
cold Mars with 12ft 4 armed amazons, ratmen, and clairvoyant crawling brain sacks.

>Verces
Planets axis faces the sun so there is no day night cycle, just an eternal twilight of inhabitable land between hemispheres of desert and tundra.
Cast system populous with just past shadowrun levels of tech.

>The Diaspora
Used to be 2 planets in shared orbit, got blown up by a Eox super weapon. Now a large asteroid belt, that's still somehow inhabited by the original populous that adapted to live in vacuum and fly through space with energy wings.

>Eox
Planet of super scientists, built a interplanetary superweapon who's back-blast killed everyone not in a private bunker.
Those in a bunker then made themselves into super liches so they could super science forever, except for one public bunker, who the liches run vault-tec experiments on.

>Triaxus
really stretched orbit means winter is an ice age and summer a vast forest, a year lasts 317 earth years, the people live for 80 earth years. So entire generations spend their life storing food for later ones, and when winter SLOWLY comes, they just hunker down rather than migrate and live another 20 years without snow.
But hey, a third of the world has dragons as nobels, and if your lucky they let you ride them.

>filename
topkek

>Liavara
Gas giant colonized by weird space whales that technologically devolved. Plus a bunch of moons that should each get their own entry but I'm a lazy bastard and this post just hit the 2000 character limit.

>Bretheda
another gas giant with more space whales, but the smart ones here are slightly less weird (at least as far as personality goes) and form malleable hive-minds to problem solve. Plus even more moons with their own entrys.

>Apostae
Has a set of large portals on it, each one connecting to another one of the planets, and one even larger portal that goes ??? and is turned off. Also has 3 large blast doors on the surface because it is actually a massive space ship, with its control core further sealed off, its creators in permanent cryo, and a DNA/creature combiner machine making all kinds of intelligent cut and paste things ever since it got here.

>Aucturn
Welcome to flesh planet, where everything is made of flesh, every creature is a cronenberg nightmare that wants to kill you (except in the loving place where they will rape you instead). Oh and did I mention that the planet itself is slowly growing because it might be a giant egg.

Holy shit Paizo is retarded

>every creature is a cronenberg nightmare that wants to kill you (except in the loving place where they will rape you instead)
okay so starfinder might not be all bad

To be fair, the full right ups make all this shit sound plausible, I'm just terrible at summerys.

Some of the out there stuff is cool, like the machine planet, spaceship planet, lich planet, and some of the gas giant moons.

My impression of Paizo has always been that it's a bunch of "That Guys." Your summaries didn't dissuade me.

Full excerpt
>The Loving Place: On most of Aucturn, the native
creatures try to kill visitors or sacrifice them to dark
gods. Within several hundred miles of the Loving Place,
however, their desires are even worse. Compelled by
strange vapors, creatures living near the Loving Place
capture any nonresident creatures they can and bring them
to the region’s central cleft, where narcotic steam from the
planet’s depths roils out in a euphoric cloud. Here, the
residents mate desperately with their prisoners regardless
of size or species, always careful not to let the prisoners
die. Fortified by the vapors, the captives quickly convert to
the new mindset themselves, birthing abominations and
leading them out to hunt for their own mate-offerings.

...

>elven illuminati

Is it bad that Starfinder is still giving me some ideas for characters?
>mfw Red Mantis Assassins in spaaaace

>What is this? A new RPG by Paizo?
No, it's Space Pathfinder. Calling it a new RPG would imply that actual work went into it.

>Castrovel
I will never not read this as Castrovalva.

Ok, maybe I'm being autistic here but: Isn't it kind of difficult to have a diverse, believable world without the potential for accidentally creating a giant mish-mash of memes and cliches? I mean, if you're going to build a world with multiple races and countries, each with their own unique customs and beliefs, this is going to happen to some extent, isn't it?

Veeky Forums may disagree with you but I think you're right
for me the problem is trying to mash all of this stuff into one setting in the first place. I guess they feel they have an obligation to if they're going to sell it as a finished product, but overall I'd be happier with a coherent but content-limited world with tips on "how to incorporate X into your OWN world" to accompany exotic new races, cultures in the rulebooks

There are ways to have multiple varied cultures that have a unifying theme or at the very least meaningful histories and interactions with one another.

This made me thinking. When does it stop being coherent? I mean have a look at our world, let's say in the middle-ages, and pretend it's a made-up fantasy world. We probably agree that when we concentrate on all of europe it's pretty coherent, but still has a good variety of cultures. Let's add the middle-east as the "exotic cultures". Still coherent? Can we good further east or is india already too strange for that? What if we go south and add sub-saharan africa? Will the people freak-out if we also add meso-americans?

Amen. Diamonds, rubies, and tritium on the ground to pick up.

You haven't stepped outside in a while, have you.

Well yes, I know you can do this. But the issue is that when you map those countries out the only way to really explain them at a high level is to give them a trite label that explains their core theme. Maps and the like don't show the history and intrigue of the world, all they get is labels along the lines of, "Here be the saracens" and "!China"

I'm not trying to say that building a cohesive world is impossible, I'm just saying that writing up meme maps like OP did isn't really a fair or reasonable way to asses a setting. I'm not terribly familiar with the lore of Golarion, but if it's anything like The Forgotten Realms then there are plenty of fair, constructive arguments you can make about why it's bad beyond a "hurr durr look at muh memes" map you did in MS Paint. If this is a board about TTRPGs and the like then why don't we try talking about how one can avoid the pitfalls of settings like these and how you can build your own cohesive world while incorporating a couple of seemingly disparate fantasy tropes?

This.

People complainign about Golarion are not really paying attention to the real world at all.

Just because worlds in fantasy books have huge swaths of homogenous culture doesn't make it 'believable'.

good point, from a first person perspective it would look pretty consistent, its only when you view it from a global sense that all of a sudden you forget that crossing one ocean or mountain can be a giant hurdle undertaken by very few people, and for most of the populous another country may as well be another world.

With that kind of insulation (and the expense, rarity, and risk of teleportation) even Golarion starts looking LESS of a messy hodge podge.

>It just throws in as many cliches as possible, along with SJW ethics, and calls itself a setting
Have you fucking seen planet earth recently?

I step outside daily thank you. I'm just saying that even if Golarion was a wonderfully interconnected world where each of the countries and their cultures interacted and meshed in meaningful, interesting ways, you could still reduce it to a shitty map of memes.

As kind of pointed out, our own, very real as far as we know anyway world is a giant mish-mash of vast culture concentrations. And you can hardly argue that that didn't come about organically. OP's original image is just a reductionist standpoint that you could perform on anything, even the real world if you wanted. I am not defending Golarion as a setting, I don't know enough about it to care either way, I'm just saying that there are much more productive ways to talk about settings, good or bad, and that OP's argument could be applied to any setting, no matter how good it is.

Although you make a good point, I'll argue that when actual human cultures and nations are, in fact, deeply cemplex and interconnected through trade, wars, migrations and the history, beliefs, origins of its people, not to mention its saillant characters, fantasy nations in Faerun or Golarion typically boil down to a tired stereotype with little nuance or interaction with its neighbors.

I played for a while in Golarion, and researched a bit of background for my character. He came from Cheliax because I thought a devil-worshipping cleric could be cool and interesting.

The information given on Cheliax is limited to pretty much "this is the evil empire of devil worshippers who used to be much bigger but there was rebellion, so the empress got cross and made a bunch of pacts with devils, so there."

It exists in a vaccuum. We know nothing of the origins of the people of Cheliax, why they came to be a hegemonic empire, if they had any other political systems before, how its aristocracy came to be and the origins of its families, what do they trade and who with, how does the average dude reacts to seeing an Erinye going for a walk with her hellhound down the street every day around 5. We don't really know why neighboring regions don't consider such a nation an immediate threat, or why they haven't formed a defensive alliance just in case.

You could argue that this kind of minute worldbuilding is up to the DM. And you'd be right. But it would mean that it's up to the DM to breathe life in a setting that is, as it is, little more than a giant theme park with a bunch rides with different colors and backdrops.

Maybe you should have picked something other than Cheliax for that example, because Cheliax actually has a supplement dedicated to it.

this, plus all the details that have come with Hell's Rebels/Hell's Vengeance/Path of the Hellknight.
Regarding the adjacent countries, Nidal is just about as evil as Cheliax, Molthune is separated by a mountain range, Isger is by all effects a vassal state to Cheliax, and Andoran has the border walled and Garrison'ed (Not that it stops Chelish agents from raiding the place). There's a Chelish colony in Rahadoum, but Rahadoum has more pressing concerns to deal with.

Land of the Linnorm Kings is pretty good.

Golarion was interesting until they started filling in the details which overrode the cool implications, wedged in modern political allegories, forced preferred alignments (CG = the real good, evil must be comically evil), and generally broke down everything into tiny chunks that are entirely independent from each other.

Paizo can only write a setting of they only stick to a single paragraph for each area.

Cheliax was a former province of the Taldan Empire that broke away during some named war and became an empire in its own right.

The devil worship came about after a civil war following the death of Aroden (a god followed most fervently by Cheliax, which was ordained to be His Heavenly Kingdom) placed the diabolical House Thrune on the throne barely 80 years before game start.

Cheliax has an ally in the form of Nidal, has Druma as a glorified trade route (along with another tribute state) and is ever eager to reintegrate Andoran into the empire after the revolution saw it break away from Chelish control.

The hegemonic empire is explained, the aristocratic families were the original Taldan noble houses that populated the region, the alliances are detailed as well as the grudges, hell the Chelaxian as an ethnic group is explicitly described as "a mixture of Ulfen and Taldan blood, sprinkled with Tian and Azlanti" since Ulfen often raid the west coast of Avistan (where Cheliax is) and the Azlant Empire was just off the coast, while Tian is because the Ulfen have a trade route with Tian Xia.

...

Yup.
Paizo staff confirmed for "That Guys" to a man.

>a setting that is, as it is, little more than a giant theme park with a bunch rides with different colors and backdrops

Isn't this exactly what you'd want as a DM though? For me these kinds of settings are like a coloring book. Someone gave me a crappy black-and-white image that I get to make my own. It's nice to not have to homebrew every thing, it's nice having professionally done maps, it's nice to have a partially established theme to work with, because you don't always wnat to build up a massive world on your own/ Don't get me wrong, FR and Golarion will never measure up when compared against something like Ravenloft, which I love dearly, but they're not supposed to.

These settings are supposed to provide a realm in which you, the DM, and your players can tell any story you wish. A land where you can have any adventure you like, at anytime. Where there is at least a flimsy scaffolding for you to go from Bunga Bunga Land to Ariabian Nights to Pirates 'n Shit if you want to, because this is magical fantasy land and fuck the rules, we have magic. No, the sotry of these settings doesn't hold up, yes, there is a bunch of half-complete shit that the DM has to fill in. And that's the point. I hardly consider it fair to call a setting shit when it's more or less doing its job AFAIK.

Yes, if you look at Forgotten Realms from a narritive persprective, it is absolute ass. A colossal cluster-fuck of cacophonous crap. Mired with Mary-Sues and poorly mixed themes, but it's not supposed to be a narritive setting. It, and Golarion with it from what I've learned since this thread started, is meant to be a play ground. Taken on their own, play grounds are shit. Just a bunch of randomly assorted plastic and metal things with no meaning. Play grounds aren't cool or interesting until you play in them, until you fill them with your own ideas and adventures. Does that make play grounds shit? No, no it does not. Play grounds are awesome. (CONT)

(CONT)
So, maybe we could stop telling everyone one that playgrounds are WongBadFun because some of us want them to be super complex, pre-engineered master pieces like the Ravenloft setting, that are fairly constricted from a narrative standpoint. Not everything needs to be Dark Sun, or Spelljammer, or Ravenloft. Those settings are awesome, but they other a very specific, refined type of awesome. Sometimes you want a wacky, ridiculous world where you can do anything at anytime (without performing extra-planar magical bullshit) and that's what FR and Golarion are for, providing a set of backdrops on which you can hold any performance you like.

/RANT

Disclaimer: I don't care for playing in either of these settings myself. I find them boring, and I much prefer to either hombrew or play in something like Ravenloft.... have I mentioned my boner for Ravenloft?

>implying tentacle love isn't the purest form of love
>implying you don't want tentacle-sama to surround you with his slimy hugs and penetrate you in that special way only he can

Clarification: I find them boring because I've played in them a lot, and because I've read too much about them. Familiarity breeds contempt and all that.