Pathfinder

Not that long ago, I had the opportunity to pick up the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting, a new OGL product from Paizo where they elucidate the details of the setting they invented to house the Pathfinder Adventure Path modules.

I'm a setting fan. I like settings. I don't really use them, per se, but I liberally steal from them. Therefore, even settings like the Forgotten Realms, which I cordially (sometimes) dislike are still of use to me, and settings like Eberron or Iron Kingdoms are goldmines. The Paizo folks, by and large, had impressed me, so I came into this setting book with high expections. As you'll see, they were more or less met, or even exceeded. This is a high quality product that offers something a bit unique to me; a setting that is both iconically D&D and yet very strangely attractive to me.

See; typically I don't like iconic D&D that much. Like I said, I don't like Forgotten Realms. I don't like Greyhawk. I don't like Blackmoor. I don't like Mystara (the Known World.) To me, they feel tired, bland, and even when they were new, they weren't that great. Pathfinder somehow manages to tap into everything that was good about those kinds of settings while simultaneously eliminating the stuff that wasn't. It feels very pulpish and classic fantasy (making obvious nods to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and others) while at the same time very modern.

That said, it wasn't a perfect book. It's pretty… it has a nice Wayne Reynolds cover, nice interior art, it's full color, quality paper, and attractively laid out. It's pricey, though. Cover price is $49.99 and it's got about 265 pages or so. The Eberron or Forgotten Realms books, on the other hand, sold for $39.99 and were at least fifty pages longer. Also, full color, with attractive cover art (also Wayne Reynolds even, in the case of Eberron) and attractively laid out. So right off the bat, I was a bit stung by the price. Indeed, the price probably introduced significant delay in me picking the book up. Once I committed to the plunge, though, I'm glad I bought the book.

It's got five chapters, and almost half the book is made up of Chapter 2: the different countries and regions. Chapter 1 is a little bit on races, cultures, classes and whatnot. Not my favorite type of material, but arguably important to include. I could take it or leave it. I did, however, appreciate the fact that they differentiated (at least in fluff, if not crunch---arguably that's the best way to do it anyway) between many different human cultures.

Chapter 2 is the real meat of the book, though, and I'm going to brush over it with a bit more detail. I can't comment on all the countries/regions, but a few highlights struck me. Absalom, for example, is the cosmopolitan port city where you can have it all if you like urban, intrigue type adventures Fun, decadent place. Cheliax, the "Nazi devil-worshippers" was a very interesting idea. Although described as in decline, I can easily see that nation poised like Germany shortly after the Nazi takeover, soon to be expanding at the expense of its neighbors, and causing all kinds of adventure possibilities in the meantime. Druma, the land of bizarre merchant-cultists make for intriguing and interesting patrons. Hermea, the land of the "eugenics dragon" is interestingly morally ambiguous (that's actually common in this setting… it may not have ditched alignment, or even officially downplayed it as Eberron did, but it's got that real amoral Sword & Sorcery vibe going all through it). Irrisen was another favorite; the ice kindgom of Baba Yaga and her heirs. Katapesh is another amoral merchant society, but much more alien than Absalom. The Mwangi Expanse was one of my favorites, as it is a catch-all for a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughsisms: a combination of Tarzan's Africa and the Land that Time Forgot all at once. I especially liked the gorilla kindgom. It's almost begging to have Opar buried in it somewhere, though. Osirion is this setting's Egypt, and they've decided to give it a kind of 18th century vibe, with the leaders having invited "archeologists" to come and raid their tombs for profit. Qadira is an interesting combination of the more liberal and progressive Islamic caliphates, the Persian Empire, and anything else interesting from the Middle East, with a nice, spooky bit where Asmodeus has caged the an even worse evil in a gigantic fissure in the ground. Ustalav has a nice gothic horror vibe going on; it's like Transylvannia of Stoker turned into a fantasy setting. Varisia is a large frontier region with only regional city-states separated by wilderness. The Worldwound is where demons sprout from the ground, inspiring crusades of varying effectiveness from its neighbors.

In the next chapters, gods and cosmology are discussed (which feels familiar to longtime D&D players, but not exactly the Great Wheel either), organizations like the Red Mantis assassins, the Hellknights (the SS of Cheliax) and the Pathfinder Society (adventurer patrons, mostly). The book finishes up by talking about all kinds of miscellany: a timeline, the Darklands (I guess the Underdark is a trademarked name; this is essentially the same thing), some mechanics (feats, prestige classes, etc.), Languages, trade routes, weather and climate.

The setting is designed to be used, of course, as is, but it's also easily raidable for use in any other setting, or homebrew. Like I said, as a bit of a D&D sceptic, who prefers a different take on fantasy than D&D usually has, I still found much to appreciate in this setting, and frankly, it made me kinda appreciate D&D a lot more. It showed me, if nothing else, that classic fantasy can be done in D&D without the overly intrusive D&Disms that tend to intrude.

As an aside, there are a few minor areas where the few mechanics it has do not exactly match the Pathfinder RPG. Technically this is an OGL product, presumably for use with D&D 3.5, that just happens to also be compatible with the Pathfinder RPG. It's a little less compatible with 4e even if you ignore the mechanics, because it frequently references classes and races that are not part of the 4e package to date, and you have to find a way to work in things like the Dragonborn, for instance. That said, the tieflings and Cheliax seem like a match made in …er… Heaven.

Fluffwise, there's no reason why you couldn't run a 4e game in the Pathfinder Setting with only a little work… either eliminating the dragonborn or finding a place to put them.