Golarion Remixed

Wow, I need to redo that banner image. Adding the canvas filter to it was probably fine for the word Golarion, but it made the light effect look really stupid. Oh, well. There's always another chance to whip up an improved banner. 

I've been thinking about how exactly I'd do this. When I did Eberron Remixed, I literally went through the entire campaign setting, and made annotations for every chapter. While there is a pretty good Golarion setting book, which I bought when it was new some seventeen years or so ago, I don't think that's the best way to handle Golarion. The setting book is quite high level, and much of what was in it has been superseded by subsequent material. The setting book isn't as "definitive" as it is in Eberron, and unlike Eberron, it isn't as comprehensive. I remember clearly making the comparison at the time that the Golarion book was $10 more cover price ($50 vs $40) than Eberron, or the earlier Forgotten Realms book, but the two official D&D settings were both at least 50 pages longer. I mean, $50 spent almost twenty years ago is water under the bridge, but I still feel like the setting is a little light as a product for what I paid. The real problem, though, is how decentralized the setting development is. The Golarion setting book is almost too high level to be useful for what I'm looking to do.

Rather, I think that the approach to take with Golarion is to treat the regions that work as "mini-campaign settings" in their own right need to be remixed discretely. I.e., rather than remixing all of Golarion, I'll remix a section as needed when I need it. Golarion—if you're not too Spotify and Gen-Z to not know this—is more like a full album rather than a track or two. You don't need to remix the whole album to get a remix of just one song that you want to remix. Heck, some of the regions never did really get much more than a high level treatment.

I'm sure that's true for places in Eberron and Forgotten Realms too, of course (in fact, I know it is—I would have liked to see more specifically about Q'barra or the Shadow Marches, for instance, but we never did) but it's especially true for Golarion, so it needs to be treated somewhat differently.

Anyway, aside from that, I've added a lot more pages, most of them reading trawl lists of big subsets of gaming books that I'd like to read or, more commonly, re-read, since in many cases I haven't done so since buying them over 15-20 years ago. There's obviously way too much stuff. It'll take me the better part of a year just to read the Paizo Adventure paths, much less all of the 1e standalone modules, Chronicles/Setting books, Companion books, etc. And all of the 3e WotC modules. And the big stack of Goodman Games modules that I got in those two humble bundles that I bought, etc.

I've got way too many gaming products. And I don't want to just read gaming products, so I have a bunch of novels that I'm reading too. Anyway, last night I finished the fourth module of the Rise of the Runelords campaign, and I'll want to read the fifth and sixth relatively quickly—probably this week, and then I can step away for at least a few days from Adventure Paths. Also just read the next Bleeding Edge module as part of my Freeport Trawl. Those are relatively short modules, so I feel like I can get them done faster; there are three more, at which point I think I've also earned a break on the Freeport stuff after hitting a natural milestone. And I have two hardback 3e books in my backpack to read; on my trip I finished Stormwrack, and now I have Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss and Monster Manual II on tap. I also have three of the much slimmer Pathfinder Chronicles books in my backpack, so I'll be busy with hard copy books for a while, but when I finish this small set, I need to pick up Races of Eberron to keep the Eberron Trawl alive. The 3e Forgotten Realms trawl also hasn't seen any action in weeks. I'm about a third of the way through book two of the Dark Waters trilogy in novels; so I want to finish that one quickly and read the last one quickly too, and I can rebox those particular books and look at what's going to be next after that. (Which I think will be the four-part Horned Helmet series by James Silke.)

Sigh. I wish I could afford to retire. I'd spend much of my time overlanding, and reading. I'd love to be reading from a rooftop tent or camp chair on my raised truck or jeep in the southwestern desert right now. Spend my days driving and hiking and my evenings reading. But I'm not there yet. And not until I pay off my house anyway.