Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting

It was a little bit of a slow slog, but I finished Paizo's Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting last night. This is a book that was the big 250+ hardcover version of their setting, but written before the PFRPG, so it's D&D 3.5 compatible, and meant as a campaign sourcebook for that. It also repeats a lot of the information from the Gazetteer, which I read not that long ago, although I never read that the first time around, so when I bought and read the Campaign Setting when it was new, I didn't realize that. Of course, I bought this when it was new, which was August 2008. I know for sure that I had it within a couple of months tops of when it was released, so sometimes early Fall 2008. That's now, of course, nearly twenty years ago, and until now, I don't think I'd read it cover to cover again since I first got it. Although I do know that I read portions of it here and there, but it had been many years since I'd picked it up and really looked through it seriously until now. I struggled just a bit because I felt like the material was either two repetitive of what I'd just read, or was too mechanical and not really what I was interested in anymore. That's still mostly, or at least partly, true. 

I had also thought that going through this it would make sense to do my Golarion Remixed project. That's how I did Eberron Remixed, after all, going through the campaign setting book and noting where I'd make changes. I didn't do that, and I don't think that I want to go through the setting book again after just having read it. I'm not sure if that means Golarion Remixed is on hiatus, or if it means that I just do it while flipping through the book to remind myself of what the content is. Mostly the changes are either really big more fairly minor, and for the really big ones, most of them are merely that I'm going to ignore that area. For instance, with Eberron Remixed, there are a lot fewer countries, so for something like Breland, for instance, I could tinker with the details of it. Golarion has a ton more countries, and they're designed so that they're much more modular; each one is almost a campaign setting in its own right with its own theme and tone, i.e., Ustalav is the horror (especially Gothic horror) setting heavily based on a Hammer Horror version of Transylvania translated into fantasy, whereas Varisia is the frontier region, Taldor is the decayed old late Byzantine Empire, Osirion is a resurgent ancient Egypt, etc. For many of the nations, I don't need to really change very much, because they're already fairly well situated as they are. A few others have too strong of a theme, and it needs to be toned down, because it's a little bit ridiculous how monolithic the theme comes across. Much of the "Greater Old Taldor" for instance, where Andoran, Galt and even Cheliax to some degree is a little too on the nose with their themes.

But a bunch of other areas, honestly, I don't know what I'd do with them. The theme doesn't really work for me, and there isn't enough detail to modify it, so I'd essentially just ignore that part of the map, except possibly the physical features and city names, but otherwise treat it as just either white space on the map, or generic fantasy countries, if for whatever reason PCs found themselves there. Which I can't imagine that I would, except possibly in a "passing through" situation, but even then, mostly what it means that I essentially excise that component from my Golarion Remixed, and it simply doesn't exist. Nations like Rahadoum, Thuvia, Druma, Razmiran, probably Hermia and a few others get this treatment. Others like Numeria, Irrisen, Nex, Geb, etc. I don't really have any changes in mind to make to them, but I also don't really have a ton of interest in that setting (or module, if you like) either, so there's no reason to list it and then not actually have any compelling changes to make to them either. In fact, I think that the whole idea that I could remix Golarion the same way I remixed Eberron may not be workable. Given that Golarian is essentially a whole bunch of modular smaller campaign settings hung together in a geography that isn't really relevant in most cases, because few campaigns cross from one "module" to another. If for some reason you want to create a campaign that does cross from one to another, you can modify the geography as needed. If I wanted to put Osirion adjacent to Taldor, for instance, I could, and why not? There's no reason to worry about going around through Qadira, or sailing by Absalom, or whatever. Sure, sure, I could, but there's no reason why I need to. That's the beauty of setting elements that are essentially modular.

Now, me calling them modular might be a little bit controversial. I don't know that Paizo themselves necessarily saw them that way when they created them. They did, after all, put them in a specific geography, and there are at least some adventure paths (although honestly not that many) that cross multiple modules. Heck, even the early Curse of the Crimson Throne technically dips its toe outside of Varisia into the Hold of Belkzen. Strange Aeons starts in Ustalav, but has a long bit of travel through Taldor, into various parts of Qadira and even Katapesh (and, of course, also the Dreamlands and Carcosa.) But those are the exceptions. Given that, maybe my Remix project needs to also be modular. For the Cult of Undeath, I essentially remixed Ustalav with my older Tarush Noptii modular setting element and ended up with Timischburg. While it's not exactly a 1:1 comparison to Ustalav, Timischburg does everything that Ustalav needs to do, at least, and I consider it "effectively" a remix, or at least a setting module that covers all of the same territory. In some respects, the Hill Country, or Humberland as I've started calling it, does something similar with Varisia; it also isn't meant to be a 1:1 comparison, but if you see Barrowmere as similar in many respects to Magnimar and Garenport as similar in many respects to Korvosa, and you can even use Burlharrow if needed as a kind of Sandpoint, then you can do anything in Varisia in Humberland instead without too much fuss. If anything, that remixing might be going the opposite direction; rather than attempting to make my elements match exactly the Paizo element, or whatever, I'm looking at the Paizo element and seeing if there's some part of the module that would make an interesting addition to my own. Do I want a Mushfens, or something similar in Humberland? Well, I've already got the Eltdown Fens, so probably not, but you get the idea. Something more like the Storval Plateau would be maybe a better element to borrow, but with the Tazitta Badlands, I've already got an area that can effectively offer the same kinds of things. I hadn't yet decided if I wanted to try and put my Curse of the Crimson Throne in Humberland, given that I've got a pretty different Grand Duke and Duchess situation compared to Ileosa and her nonsense, but I can either make an alternate version of it where I change the nature of the Grand Duke and his wife, or I set it after the events of Darkness in the Hill Country have already played out, and the both of them are now gone to be replaced with whatever new characters that can play the role of Eodred and Ileosa. Or, of course, since the AP takes place almost completely in the city, I can just set it somewhere else in my own setting, too. I kind of like maybe having it be a city-state on the Corsair Coast... with travel into Porhomok for the out of town stuff, but I'm not necessarily sold on any of these ideas yet. Doing it somewhere maybe a little more unexpected like Lomar or Volek Szemenok would be interesting too.

Actually, the more I think of it, the more I like Lomar. I can work in the Zobnan vs Nyxian culture clash as part of the drama while I'm at it, and maybe the problems with "Ileosa" can actually be the bigger problem that helps resolve that one way or another.

Next up on the Paizo Chronicles trawl is Gods and Magic which is pdf (although I have two physical books in a row on that trawl after that) and next up in physical game book reading is Monster Manual III from the 3.5 era. After kicking around Campaign Setting book for as long as I did, it's nice to move on.

Of course, it also occurs to me that there's no need to read the trawls completely in order. Lacking a compelling reason to pull them out of order, I'd rather not, but I can move stuff around if I have a need or desire to read something down-trawl earlier. I got a physical copy recently of Horror Adventures, which at the rate I'm going, I won't have scheduled to read for many months, but I'll probably read it in October, because .... because October, honestly. While I'm at it, I'd like to read Curse of Strahd and Expedition to Castle Ravenloft in October too. Of those, only Curse of Strahd is actually next in its trawl; the other two won't come up for many months. I especially don't want to read the Paizo Adventure Paths or Stand-Alone modules out of order (the first even more than the latter) but the other trawls I don't care nearly as much. I'll almost certainly also not read the Eberron or FR trawls out of order, and probably not the 5e campaigns. Everything else is subject to my whim, honestly.