Reading update and Greater Taldor Remixed

Quick reading update... what I tend to post the most lately, sadly. I finished the slim Pathfinder Companion book Taldor, Echoes of Glory, which I bought in physical form when it was new. I actually have the next two Pathfinder Companion books in physical form which I bought when they were new, Qadira, Gateway to the East, and Cheliax, Empire of Devils. While I know that the themes of a lot of these lands are the whole point, I feel like one of the problems with Golarion as a setting (and one of the main reasons for my Golarion Remixed project, when I get around to making the next update for it) is that the themes are actually too strong; they feel one note and almost caricaturish. Some of them need to be strong; Varisia as a frontier, for instance, or Ustalav as the horror area, Osirion as fantasy Egypt, etc. but I feel like the following themes are borderline ridiculous, and I don't mch like them: 1) Taldor as old-fashioned monarchy characterized by sad, pitiful decline, 2) Cheliax as taken over by devil-worship, 3) Galt as the never-ending French Revolution, and 4) Andoran as crusading Marxist abolitionists and anti-monarchists. Heck, a third of the counties of Ustalav have an anti-nobility bourgeois hierarchy and have the Galt and Andoran themes already built in without it being so over-the-top that it's a joke. 

So clearly that's going to be a major portion of my remix project, to make these elements, to the extent that I end up using them anyway, make more sense, feel more real, and less like a cartoonish caricature. I've kind of hinted at these points before, but let me make them more explicit here in this post. Let me do it dot points style:

• 
  All of the areas that have formerly been part of Greater Taldor and/or Greater Cheliax remain in loose association with Taldor still as a kind of confederacy of sorts; somewhere between Scotland's relationship with England and Canada's relationship with England. They all consider themselves culturally part of Taldor to a greater or lesser degree, and consider each other as allies in times of need, but otherwise operate pretty independently. But, because they all come from the same cultural and legal tradition, their governments and legal backgrounds are more similar than different.
• What is today Taldor and Cheliax remain the anchors of the agreement, and rivalry between Egorian and Oppara remain high, as each jockeys to be the more prominent or prestigious partner. Oppara is more hands-off, preferring the laissez-faire association that currently exists, while Egorian would prefer to centralize and federalize more... in exchange for greater tribute, of course. 
• Andoran is the among the silliest of nations in Golarion as written. Making it a large, prosperous area that operates independently under a Senate of sorts, mimicking the Senate of Taldor (and Rome, for that matter) with Codwin I as, instead of a former Marxist or Jacobin style leader, is a hands-off noble who, due to generations of legal bindings, couldn't have a very active role even if he wanted to. I see him as not terribly unlike King Charles, except if Canada had a separate king. Andoran Remixed was never part of Cheliax, but based on geography, is of course, between Taldor and Cheliax, and frequently serves as a go-between smack dab in the middle of the two rivals. Because of its own strong military and mercantile resources, it's one of the more powerful voices in Greater Taldor, and doesn't feel the need to curry favor with either, and they are in many ways becoming a third pole on the rivalry; only mitigated by the fact that Almas isn't interested in pursuing influence at the expense of Oppara or Egorian.
• Molthune, Nirmathas, Lastwall and Galt are all quieter frontier areas, if you want to call them that, and some of the silliness like Galt's never-ending revolution are to be greatly toned down. The conflict between Nirmathas and Molthune is also going to be less like open warfare and more of an internal issue like The Troubles. These are supported by troops from Taldor, Andoran and Cheliax as needed, but only against outside enemies, not against each other.
• More far-flung colonies, nations or others that have some ethnic Taldoran influence include Sargava, Ustalav, Korvasa, Magnimar, Absalom and others, and while not part of Greater Taldor per se, they are kind of like "junior members" in a mostly symbolic way with Greater Taldor. 
• Cheliax's House Thrune may well be devil worshippers, but not openly, if so. That's more of a conspiracy theory than something confirmed and open, and may well be based on the basalt Gothic architecture style as much as anything else. No doubt there are really bad people in House Thrune, but it's arguable that they are worse than any other noble house in any other nation, necessarily. 

Other than that, I'll probably defer on assigning any specific remix changes until I either get to a setting product that details those countries in more detail, or an adventure path or module that requires me to detail any of it. Honestly, I don't intend to set a lot of stuff in Greater Taldor necessarily, but some of the adventure paths I know for sure take place in Cheliax and/or Taldor. 

• Even Curse of the Crimson Throne is tangentially related, given Queen Ileosa's background as a minor Chelaxian noblewoman, although if I adapt this, any references to Greater Taldor are probably moot.
• Council of Thieves takes place in Cheliax. 
• Serpent's Skull takes place in Sargava, but if I remember correctly, nothing really needs to be changed.The Vidrian Revolution I have absolutely no interest in, but it doesn't feature in any APs or even modules that I can see; it all happened in the background in the update to the setting between 1e and 2e. Most of those updates, honestly, I'm not really in favor of.
• Carrion Crown is in Ustalav, but given that that was even once (briefly) a part of Greater Taldor prior to the Whispering Tyrants's first rule, and that Lastwall was founded specifically by Taldor to fight him, there may possibly be some Taldoran influence here and there to address.
• Hell's Rebels and Hell's Vengeance are both set in Cheliax and strongly feature the devil-worshipping theme of House Thrune. I'll probably need to rework these at a root level to use them in my remixed setting.
• Strange Aeons features a section that travels through Taldor, but I don't think too much of it needs to change.
• Ironfang Invasion features the actual invasion by monsters of a protected member of Greater Taldor, so it may well require some significant reworking in the remixed version too. Again, assuming I have any desire to ever run this anyway.
• War for the Crown is the iconic political thriller AP in Taldor. Of course, it, along with most of the Paizo Golarian as written stuff, is all about installing a progressive grrlboss as the new leader. But it can probably be used even if I change that. The AP, I understand it, is full of all kinds of high magic. Two candidates to the throne are resurrected after being killed, for instance. I'll probably have to change more than just turning Eutropia (or her role, anyway) into a man.
• Tyrant's Grasp is about the fall of Lastwall, and therefore impacts Greater Taldor. Then again, I'm not sure that I'm a huge fan of the meta-story changes in some of these APs as a concept. The reality is that I'd be very unlikely to run them, even as heavily redacted and changed as I do. More likely, I'll simply borrow material from them but in a different context.

A lot of the backstory of these nations is related to their religion, particularly that of Aroden, which was the patron god of Taldor and it's spin-offs, and who's death was a seminal moment in the theme of the whole setting. Given that I don't intend to use Pathfinder's religions, but substitute my own, that also will have an impact on the details of the setting. But my PANTHEON tag isn't quite ready for a major update quite yet.

Golarion Remixed

I'm going to do it. I'm going to remix Golarion. I've already got a good start with some earlier noodling that I did, but I'm going to actually start with remixing the rules. I'm going to use the Race Builder rules to build the races that Old Night has, I'm going to tweak available classes, use E6, and otherwise tweak the Pathfinder 1e rules to work for my setting, if I wanted to use them, and then I'm going to take this House Rule document and remix the setting. Some of the elements of Golarion will get a minor face lift. Some will be ignored and will essentially not exist for all intents and purposes (although I don't think I'll literally excise them, I'll just deliberately ignore them.) Where Golarion has nations that I'm not interested in at all, Golarion Remixed will have blank spots on the map with nothing of interest. Like I did with Eberron Remixed, changing up the races and adapting it to a low magic dark fantasy vibe will naturally change the setting quite a bit, and Golarion Remixed will work perfectly well with the Shadow of Old Night rules... but it won't need to, because my Pathfinder 1e House Rules document will perfectly model the setting as well. They'll be two complementary systems for achieving the same thing, and the "DesdichadoFinder" house rules for Pathfinder 1e will also work perfectly for the Old Night setting too. 

But as with the Eberron Remixed project, the real fun is actually remixing the setting to fit the rules, including the allowed races and the changed assumptions about magic availability and PC power in general. If Darkness In the Hill Country is meant to be run in the Old Night setting with the Old Night rules, it could equally well be run in Golarion Remixed's version of Varisia with the Pathfinder house rules. That is, in fact, exactly the point. 

There may be some third party rules in play. I'll almost certainly use the Freebooter class from the Freeport book, because it's a great class, and I like it for the swashbuckler archetype more than I like Paizo's own Swashbuckler class. I may also take some of the Madness rules from that book as well. (After I compare them to whatever Horror Adventures has, and even maybe what the 5e SPCM book has to see which gives me the best experience). This will be an old-fashioned "binder of house rules". Well, maybe not that bad. I hope actually that by kitbashing and mostly by limiting what's available, I can do it in just a few short pages. But it's a weird exercise. This isn't the way most people would play a Pathfinder game. But I'm not trying to play a Pathfinder game, I'm trying to get Pathfinder to accommodate my specific tastes for a low magic, dark fantasy game with a low magic, sword & sorcery, dark fantasy tone and themes. Although 1e is arguably a little better at that than 2e or than D&D 5e is, it's still very much a game of Open Society, Diversity, Inc. super-heroes who are meant to appeal to the power fantasies of broken wokesters first and foremost, so it'll need some help to get there. But it's not a lost cause; the elements are there, you just need to go through them with a highlighter saying "don't use this, it won't work". And that's 95% of what I'll be doing; creativity by limit rather than actually building all that much that's new. 

Of course, although I'm pretty familiar with Pathfinder 1e from years of poking around it's PSRD and reading all kinds of setting and adventure supplements that are supported by it, I've never actually read the rulebooks in a the traditional sense. So this will also probably be a long-running work in progress, as Pathfinder 1e is infamous for, among other things, having lots of lots of rules spread over lots and lots of books. I've had many of the original core rulebooks in pdf for a long time; they were worth it to extract the art alone! but I've recently bought the pocket (trade paperback, really) sized core rulebook, and intend to start reading it shortly, cover to cover. But it'll be until I get to the Advanced Player's Guide and some of the other subsequent books that I'll really be able to start sifting through many of the options like archetypes and alternate classes, etc. 

I've created a new tag, PATHFINDER REMIXED and a new banner both. Some posts will merit both Golarion Remixed and Pathfinder Remixed, but many will focus on just the rules or just the setting, and therefore will get one or the other. 

Golarion Remixed

I'm going through some of my trawls, and I'm reading the early Gazetteer product by the Paizo crew, almost of all which was incorporated whole cloth into the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting... I believe. Anyway, the largest section of this is the "Nations" section, and I thought I'd add my comments as I read it, since it's a slowish Saturday afternoon for me.

Absalom: I'm currently reading the Old Testament on audiobook while commuting in the morning, and it wasn't that long ago that I finished the two books of Kings and started well into Chronicles. The name feels fake to me, knowing of course, that this is King David's son who led an ultimately unsuccessful coup against the King. I know that America has largely lost many of the details of its originally Christian cultural traditions, and people don't recognize Old Testament stories the way that they used to a few generations ago, but it's still weird that they use such a clearly prominent Bible name. Other than that, though, I don't really have any problems with this element of the setting. I think the siege castles of weird dungeons just outside of town is a stupid D&D affectation, but that's easier to just ignore than to overtly change it.

Andoran: The self-righteous proselytizing of "muh democracy" was tiresome before I even finished reading the basic description. Sadly, his over-the-top stupid detail tends to hide the fact that otherwise Andoran, as a nation with cultural and ethnic ties to both Taldor and Cheliax, but unwilling to accept the rule of the House of Thrune, is a fine idea. I don't have any interest in that non-stop ideological bent of Andoran; that needs to be replaced with them just acting like normal people, not woke mutants. But I do like the idea that in spite of their ties to both Cheliax and Taldor, they're unwilling to unite with either until they get their act together. But maybe they're more like the Commonwealth than like the fully independent US, i.e., all of the former Taldoran and Chelaxian nations still recognize the authority of the thrones in Oppara and maybe even Egorian; they simply can't work them them. For that matter, other former dependencies like Galt, etc. will have this same thing going on. I don't know if it's because Paizo is made up of professional woke mutants or not, but they don't understand how normal people think and act, and have made some of the "personalities" of some nations unbelievably one-dimensionsal and tedious and frankly unbelievable. 

Belkzen: In one ironic place where I actually agree with the woke mutants in gaming, I think orcs as they've been portrayed in D&D and RPGs in general is pretty boring. This doesn't have to have anything to do with the "orcs as black people" nonsense; all the way back to early Warhammer, Warcraft and Heroes of Might and Magic games in the 90s, the idea of orcs as at least somewhat sympathetic if savage and barbaric peoples who act more or less like people rather than caricatures has been growing. Before getting coopted by the woke mutants and leading to the nonsense of 5.5's "Mexican orcs" joke. Anyway, I've already talked at length about how to make orcs more interesting, and I've done this already in Old Night; I'll no doubt do the exact same to Belkzen. Having Belkzen simply be "Mordor, but without a real Dark Lord holding it together" was never very interesting to me. 

Brevoy: This is a weird frontier region that because it is largely disconnected from most of the rest of what's going on in Avistan, doesn't really need anything changed. 

Cheliax: Other than downplaying the open-ness of House Thrune's diabolical connections, I probably don't need to change much here either. I think it's ridiculous that a whole society of open devil-worshippers would put on a civilized face, so we'll have it be more a case of Gothic aesthetic and secret, or at least discrete with plausible deniability connections to devils. I also dislike the myriad of distinctions between fiends in D&D and D&D-like games. Sure, sure; factions that don't get along with each other, that makes sense. The full on use of alignment to separate them along the chaos/law axis doesn't. That probably doesn't matter too much to Cheliax's nature, however.

I also want to make Cheliax to still be (at least on paper) suzerain over places like Andoran, Galt, etc., although the strength of that suzerainty is waning fast.

Druma: The idea of a nation of capitalist-cultists with a religion of consumerism is exactly the kind of nonsense you'd expect from Seattle weirdos. That doesn't mean that the idea of a mercantile kingdom with a weird, clannish aristocracy isn't salvageable, though, just that you need to downplay the over-the-top weirdness that Paizo allowed Druma to accumulate. 

Galt: The idea of a French Revolution that's been going on for generations now is also stupid. Like with Andoran, Galt needs to tone down it's over-reliance on one, kind of overplayed and shrill idea. Sure, sure, it's unhappy with House Thrune, and the degree to which its leaders actually still support being considered a part of Cheliax, when they're quite a ways away from it anyway, is OK. The idea that there is a competing faction of nouveux aristocrats, and skullduggery and intrigue, murder and political machination is commonplace in Galt; I can get behind all of that. But people still need to actually live normal lives, or this kind of thing can't last. The real French Revolution didn't last 40+ years; it lasted ten and for decently long stretches there, it was quiet, only flaring up into widespread violence on relatively few occasions.

Geb: I don't know for sure what to think of the high-magic countries like Geb or Nex. I understand why they exist, I suppose, but I've never had much use for them. I think Geb also feels like a less-developed also-ran of Ustalav. To be fair, I haven't read the Blood Lords adventure path. I'll probably uneasily leave it more or less as it is, but of course, since I greatly prefer a much more low level and low magic game, I'm not quite sure what an African or semi-Egyptian undead nation will actually offer me. I'll probably mostly just refer to it, if at all, very obliquely and otherwise pretend that it doesn't exist. honestly.

Irrisen: I'm not quite sure what to make of this one either. A nation where it's literally always winter is a wasteland, not capable of supporting a population. One ruled by fey-touched witches and whatnot, where winter is long and cold and the witches have a cold-weather Frozen kind of aesthetic works, but again, it's too exaggerated to take seriously. And the adventure path set here literally has an adventure where you're supposed to travel to WWI era Russia and deal with Rasputin. Lolwut? I need to do a bit more research into the details to understand exactly how to change this, but right away, I know for sure that having it literally always be winter doesn't work.

Isger: The notion of Isger as a thoroughly dominated frontier region of Cheliax, recovering from a devastating series of invasions by goblinoids (or orcs) and now a kind of Mad Max-like shell of its former self probably doesn't really need any particular change at a high level. Details may, of course, vary, but the Gazetteer doesn't provide many, and I don't think I've read any modules or anything else that takes place in Isger that I'd feel inclined to change.

Jalmeray: This is another high magic bastion of wokified Orientalism. I've met way too many Indians to be impressed with Indian-inspired cultural elements in gaming. But as a foreign place with an elemental/genie kind of vibe that you don't actually do much of anything with, I suppose it works. Maybe the Princes of the Apocalypse can actually be from a place like this, or at least are worshipped here. A cult of "elemental evil" reigning on Jalmeray is more interesting to me than a culture of Bollywood martial artists. 

Katapesh: I've always quite liked Katapesh more or less as it is. Or at least as it was in 1e. I hear that they've taken the tooth out of it, like so many other elements, in the wake of the move to 2e, so I'll almost certainly be ignoring that. The chance that I actually get to doing anything meaningful with 2e or its products is pretty low, though, so eh. Who cares?

Kyonin: While I admit to not being a huge fan of fantasy elves and weird, flaky elf-kingdoms, I also recognize that it's probably important that they exist in a D&D-adjacent fantasy. I wonder sometimes if I should swap the elves for some kind of fey-touched humanoid that's a little less... elfin, or whatever, (even if they use the same name) but I'll otherwise probably pretty much ignore them. 

Lastwall: While the concept of Lastwall is fine, actually finding something interesting to do with it seems kind of a lost cause. In 2e, Lastwall has fallen and been converted to the Gravelands. I might go ahead and do the same, honestly, in one anachronistic referral to 2e. At least the Gravelands as a place for adventure is an interesting place to go. Lastwall was just like hanging out on a self-righteous military base, and then going somewhere else to actually do anything.

The other alternative is to give them the melancholy aspect of the fading Crusader States; aristocrats, formerly warriors, surrounded by foreigners and holding on to a way of life that is doomed to end within a generation or two. But that makes Lastwall more like a normal place, with Ustalavian commoners running an Ustalavian way of life outside of the ethnic and cultural Taldoran nobles castles. It probably doesn't matter. Paizo couldn't ever figure out anything interesting to do with Lastwall other than destroy it, so maybe I just ignore it too. That's the benefit of a large, diverse setting like Golarion. Anything that I can't think of to make actually better than what they came up with, I can simply ignore and pretend like it doesn't exist at all. I kind of like the idea of it being like a portion of Ustalav, except under the influence of foreigner-kings who owe no loyalty to Ustalav.

Or, if not Ustalav, maybe Molthune and Nimrathis, etc. from the south.

Linnorm Kings Lands: I changed the name slightly to make it fit alphabetically; in the Gazetteer, it was referred to as Linnorm Kings, Lands of, which I thought was kind of dumb. This nation is more or less OK as is. I'd, again, tone down it's "wintriness"; Scandinavia is certainly a habitable place today, for instance. And White Astrid the female Linnorm King is pandering to people who apparently don't know any real women. But those are minor details; mostly a kingdom of para-Vikings tends to work fairly well in most Eurocentric fantasy.

Mammoth Lords Realm: Another one with the strange alphabeticization; but still. A place where Conan-like barbarians live alongside Rancholabrean fauna and even dinosaurs coming up from a Pellucidar-like Underdark vault deep under the earth is fine.

Mendev: This is another nation that has one, too-shrill note for its existence. I think treating it like it was before the Crusades, i.e., kind of like Brevoy, but with lots of companies of mercenaries due to conflicts with both Brevoy, Numenaria and Sarkoris/the Worldwound is more interesting than literally a nation of cold Crusaders and various pointedly corrupt hangers-on.

Molthune: Like many of the former Chelaxian or Taldoran colonies, I prefer to see Molthune as simply a more autonomous frontier region of Cheliax still; one that is not subservient, and might even be openly rebellious against House Thrune, but not against the notion of a united Cheliax of which it is a part. Othewise, surprisingly little else needs to change. The same can be said for Nimrathas, except their conflict and rebellion is more local. 

Mwangi Expanse: I actually like the idea of savage pulp-tale inspired jungles, and Paizo have only somewhat poisoned this idea with their leftist disapproval of "colonialism" and "racism." Still, other than ignoring those themes, and maybe race or alignment swapping a few details here and there, this works pretty well as is. 

Nex: I'll be honest with you; I know even less what to do with this kingdom than I do with Geb. I think maybe the two of them work better if, instead of being high fantasy magical superhero countries in two flavors, they are instead shown as a post-apocalyptic wasteland (in two flavors) based on based battles of two Heresiarchs or other powerful mages that are more like The Ten Who Were Taken rather than D&D archmages. But I just fundamentally don't really like or trust the high magic stuff, so where Golarion focuses on that, which it should as a setting meant to have something for everyone, no doubt, I will tend to either change the theme or just ignore that area altogether. 

Nidal: This is another place that I'm not quite sure what to do with, and neither is Paizo, I feel. The idea of a place under the thrall of the Plane of Shadow as it's theme is fine, but in doing that, they've created a land where agents of Nidal operating outside its borders is much more interesting than anything you could actually do in Nidal itself. I'd probably have to have it be an area that's "coterminous" for lack of a better word with the Plane of Shadow and replace its capital that you're never supposed to visit anyway, with something like Gloomwrought from the 4e Shadowfell book would work better.

Nirmathas: I prefer to see this as a rebellious area of Molthune, and therefore, like Molthune, a frontier province of Cheliax. Closely allied with whatever Lastwall is, and actually the subject of plenty of sympathy from day-to-day Molthunian people, it's more a case of the terrible leadership and mismanagement of Molthune by its elites that has led to the crisis that it finds itself in. Nirmathas also doesn't see itself as anti-Chelaxian, and has in fact made some tentative overtures to Cheliax for aid against the mismanagement of those of Molthune, but Cheliax has its own problems, is in decline, and the House of Thrune doesn't care much about the plight of a bunch of frontier yokels and their claims of being oppressed by bad nobles. 

Numeria: I've never really cared for the idea of a "Barrier Peaks" kingdom, which is honestly exactly what Numeria was meant to be. I'd rather see it as a semi-barbaric land, but instead of aliens and robots and lasers, I'd be more likely to have Lovecraftian entities that also share some similarities with the gray alien mythos adapted to fantasy be the source of the weirdness. If I ever were to get around to adapting the Iron Gods adventure path, it'll be a real challenge given the significant changes to the base setting.

Osirion: Your fantasy needs an Egypt. There's nothing significant I'd change about this one.

Qadira: I don't know why Qadira has to be merely the westernmost province of an unseen and undescribed vast Keleshite empire. I mean, I guess they were going for the Imperial Persian feel here, but Qadira vs Taldor already gives us an effective Sassanids vs Byzantines vibe without needing to postulate a completely unseen eastern majority to Qadira. Let Qadira just stand alone. And with that minor change, I don't think I need to do much else. I don't particularly like Sarenrae as the patron goddess of Qadira, but I'll change all of the religion of my Golarion Remixed anyway, so I'll deal with that in another post some other time.

Rahadoum: This is another one of the stupidest idea of the Golarion design team; a kind of western north African kingdom that is defined by being aggressively anti-religious? Yeah, no, that's dumb. I'd rather combine Rahadoum and maybe even Thuvia as merely regions in a Barbary Coast like situation. And the Rahadoumi (?) are no more or less religious than anyone else. What an inane idea.

Razmiran: Whenever Paizo attempts to do something weird with religion, it's a mis-step. I don't mind a tyrannical wizard-king as a ruler, but him having this secret cult where he pretends to be a god and isn't is just silly. Again, I don't know how much changing that matters; I don't think there are a lot of adventures or other material that really focuses on the Razmiran cult that I'd have to even change anyway.

River Kingdoms: This feels a little too patchwork for my taste, but I'll probably leave it more or less as is. I haven't ever read the Kingmaker adventure path, so until I do, I'm reluctant to postulate any significant changes until I do, I suppose. I'm more likely to see the River Kingdoms as the River Communities, however, and see them as a decentralized yet culturally contiguous area less marked by constant warfare against each other and more marked by threats from their neighbors encroaching on the border communities. Paizo already does this part OK, so it's just a question of focusing more on that instead of violence just being something that's always happening between different sections of this area.

Sargava: Sargava is a metaphor or allegory for how bad European colonialism is. Since I tend to think European colonialism is mostly good for the natives, if not necessarily for the Europeans, this is actually backwards; the failing of the Sargavan colony due to being cut off isn't something to be celebrated and accelerated, it's to be mourned. It's a tragedy of the greatest order. I'll tend to focus less on the failing of Sargava, though, and make it probably more thriving.

Shackles: The Shackles was such a disappointment. Paizo couldn't think of what to do with a pirate-themed area other than make it a collage of all kinds of other crap that doesn't fit. It really just needs to be northern, mostly Chelaxian, pirate-lords on a kind of Corsair Coast. Hey, have I had that idea somewhere already before? If I want to have a darker version or element within it, than something like Iron Kingdom's Cryx works well. Otherwise, yeah; just borrow loads of Freeport-ish stuff and make it just piratey. The Shackles was hugely, hugely disappointing to me. I looked up my original review when I first got it, and at the time I was bravely trying to like it, it seems, but now I just find it pretty silly and unlikely to work for me. 

Sodden Lands: There isn't much material, I don't think, set in the Sodden Lands, but a place lashed by a supernatural storm that won't abate after decades, inhabited by 1) savage cannibals who attack and eat anyone who lands on sight, and 2) an abandoned soothsayer culture who's soothsayers saw something that caused them all to commit suicide; I mean, what's not to love there?

Taldor: As one of the biggest, most consequential, but still kind of tragic nations of the setting, Taldor works pretty much as is. It's basically the fantasy version of the late Byzantine Empire, but you have the opportunity to reverse the decline rather than watch it disappear and get swallowed up by the Ottomans and the Islamic conquest, if you like. Not that Paizo's woke mutants would ever really understand that theme exactly, but I do. I'd have to adapt War for the Crown, if I ever do, to make sure that I focus on that theme rather than sexism or whatever stupid theme the authors gave it.

Thuvia: Another nation that is based on a trumped idea that isn't deep or interesting enough to support a whole nation. I'll just merge it with my revised Rahadoum. Maybe the sun orchid elixir can still exist, but it's just a significant trade good, not the whole raison d'etre for the whole nation. 

Ustalav: This was already always one of the best elements of the Golarion setting. Although I've heavily modified it into my Timischburg nation for my setting, if running a Golarion Remixed, I'd change very little if anything of this, other than perhaps to expand its borders a bit into the dubious neighboring kingdoms that I don't particularly care for.

Varisia: Varisia is another one that I quite like as is, at least if I'm specifically playing a Golarion Remixed game (although once again, my Humberland/Hill Country region largely can be seen as a reflection of the same themes.) The only thing I'd change is replace Kaer Maga with some other city that isn't so stupid. I'm considering the old 3e Bluffside, but I still have to read that book to verify it.

World-wound: I actually like the idea of Old Sarkoris better than the World-wound. A land of creepy witches and barbarians? Fallen to demonic or Lovecraftian cults, but still there, just a place that's almost as bad as "an Abyssal layer, but on the regular world." Sure, sure, they summon all kinds of obyrith and aberration like insanity, but it isn't literally the Abyss spreading across the landscape. It's still a normal place, more like the benighted and creepy backwoods of Lovecraft's stories like Innsmouth or Dunwich.

<  †  >

Anyway, that's my review of the nations of the Gazetteer, at least. The next chapter is on religion in the Inner Sea region, but I already have my alternate D&D pantheon. Curiously, I detailed it in a post in which I was also talking about Golarion Remixed. 

Dear Diary, on reading...

I finished the second book of the Dark Waters trilogy the other night, Bones of the Yopasi but I haven't quite started the last one yet. After being pretty bullish on the first book, I'm feeling just a bit more bearish now. Not that this book wasn't as good, because mostly it was, but because I'm just a little bit over MacNeill's obvious flaws. Notably: 1) many of his characters and their dialogue are caricaturish, and the more of that you see, the worse it feels like. I thought it was only mildly obnoxious and occasionally kind of amusing and endearing earlier, but after another novel full of it, I'm less convinced that it was a good idea. A full on Scottish brogue from a guy with Scottish ancestry who was born and lived his whole life in Massachusetts? That was too much. It was the straw that kind of broke the camel's back and now suddenly it wasn't amusing or endearing anymore; it was too much. 2) The namedrops of monsters and characters and locations is also getting to be too much. I appreciate some of it, but I feel like this is really over-the-top in this particular novel too. Again, too much too fast and it went from being a good thing to being an annoying thing.

Other editing gaffes; although he doesn't use homely (when in an American sense it should be homey) as often, he does a few times. He does mention several times burying the lead, which is also incorrect. It's not a lead, it's a lede. I don't necessarily expect authors to know these things. McNeill is Scottish, so it's not surprising that he uses homely instead of homey, because that's what they use in the UK. But it's not what we use in America, where his book is set. And lede/lead; unless you talk to journalists or at least read about journalism, you may not know that. That's not his fault. That's his editors'. That's their job to catch stuff like that.

This doesn't mean that I'm changing my recommendation on reading them. It does mean that... I dunno, I guess maybe they're not impressing me quite as much as I remembered. But I'm still enjoying them. But yeah; just in the last fifty pages or so, there were gratuitous references to "The Horror at Red Hook," "The Strange High House in the Mist", "The Terrible Old Man", "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," "The White Ship", of course "Call of Cthulhu," and probably more that I'm missing. It was a bit much. If you're not a Lovecraft fan already, these won't mean much to you and you may not even get them. 

I also read the module portion of "Sins of the Saviors." I didn't mark it off, because the module portion is just a little over half the page count; I need to read the setting stuff on Rune Magic, Lamashtu, and the Eando Kline serialized short story, as well as the bestiary for this time around. All in all that's a good 40+ pages, but I might finish it tonight. This is one of the least memorable of the early episodes, because it's just a high level magical funhouse dungeon crawl. Not at all my style, and almost everything that happens feels either disconnected from the actual narrative, or only connected to it by fiat, so it feels forced and fake. The final one, "Spires of Xin-Shalast" has a slightly longer module section, and slightly less fluff and mechanical goodies section, for the same overall page count. Still, there's a meme among Pathfinder fans, I guess, that most adventure paths have very strong first halves and less strong second halves. I've always thought that this was true for Rise of the Runelords, at least. 

I think the next adventure path, Curse of the Crimson Throne is also seen as a kind of classic, with more urban intrigue and whatnot. It also takes place in Varisia, but focuses much more on Korvasa. The third one is Second Darkness which seems to widely be considered one of the weakest adventure paths, forced into being just so Paizo could shoe-horn their alternate version of the Underdark and dark elves into the game. It also takes place in Varisia, I guess, starting in Riddleport, and somewhat staying nearby when it's not down in the Darklands. After that is Legacy of Fire, the last one to use the 3.5 rules, and after that is Council of Thieves, the first one that I'm not fairly familiar with, so I'm excited to get to that point and really explore new territory. Of course, after that is Serpent's Skull and Carrion Crown, which I deconstructed years ago here on this blog, and then we get to Jade Regent, which is the Orientalism adventure path, which I was never all that interested in, not being a chinoiserie punk myself. Which is a fancier word for weeabo, I guess. I don't know. The trawl goes on. After I finish Rise of the Runelords I'll probably take a small break and read something else, though. Push through on Freeport, and go back to 3e Forgotten Realms for a book or two or something.

I also started re-reading Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss, which is slimmer than I remembered. The first chapter I remember not liking, but I'm almost finished with it. The second and third chapters are great; new demon monster lists and of course the demon lords. Most of the rest of the book isn't bad either, although the obligatory "new feats, new spells, new magic items" is always pretty boring to me. Prestige classes, on the other hand, are sometimes interesting, especially late in 3.5's run, where they had much more fluff than they used to rather than just focusing on mechanics. After I read this, I've also got Monster Manual II off the shelf, as well as three of the slim Pathfinder Chronicles books (later rebranded as Pathfinder Setting, or whatever exactly they called it.) After those, I'll finally pick up Races of Eberron and get the Eberron trawl moving again too. 

Although I have an insurmountable amount of digital product in particular to read in front of me, my physical copies of things to read are actually getting manageable. I don't have too much stacked up. In fact, I need to start thinking of what novels to read a few months into the new year, because I'll probably be caught up with what I have in the batting order in the next little bit. It'll be time to go box diving to see if I can find books that I either haven't ever read in spite of owning them for some time, or at least haven't read in years and might be interested in reading again. It probably wouldn't kill me to buy a few new novels too, for that matter.

I've also been asked if I'd be willing to be a "substitute DM" for a group that I'm not in, but which overlaps a couple of people with people that I do game with. I'll get more info on that, but if I do run for them, one or possibly even two sessions in early December, I'll probably need to read something to run. Maybe I'll do the first Freeport module, especially if I get committed to two sessions. A two-shot, as it were. It was initially pitched to me as standing in in their current ongoing campaign, but if I'm not misunderstanding that, I don't think that's a reasonable approach. I don't know jack squat about their ongoing campaign or the characters, etc. I'm not even a player in that game. I appreciate the vote of confidence, but that's a tall order. I'd rather do a one or two shot separate from that.

Not that I'm trying to do so, but I wonder if that will let me poach a few of the better players for a better group. My own group, which overlaps two or three players with this group, has two solid guys (other than me) and two somewhat flaky ones who miss a lot and make scheduling often difficult. Ideally, I think we'd like one or two more reliable players, and then we can either take or leave the flaky ones.

But I've been specifically told by one of the players in my group that... er... she doesn't recommend that we attempt to get at least one or two of them in, because they're not the most fun to hang out with. I don't know them well, but I know one and maybe two of them at least well enough to have suspected exactly that; they're kind of super talkative know-it-all smartboys who have to get the last word in on every conversation types. Not creepy, just... not fun to hang out with either. Gammas, mostly.

It's better to play shorthanded than play with the wrong people. Or even not play at all than play with the wrong people, honestly.

UPDATE: It's Friday morning. I'll read some tonight and this weekend, although tomorrow in particular is a bit more busy than I'd like (I'd really love a staycation day where I literally didn't have to leave the house. I have two unscheduled PTO days left for the year. I can roll them over, but I get a lot of PTO next year too, so I might well take just some staycation days in early/mid December. Goals for this weekend to read:

• Read "Spires of Xin-Shalast" and close the book on Rise of the Runelords, at least for this trawl.
• Finish Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss
• Read at least the next Bleeding Edge module in the Freeport Trawl. Maybe the next two, if I'm lucky.
• Queue up and maybe start the next 3e Forgotten Realms trawl book (Lords of Darkness)
• Queue up and start the next novel, Dweller in the Deep by Graham McNeill. As soon as I finish that, I finish the whole Dark Waters trilogy and the whole Arkham Horror two-trilogy novel set that I own. Arkham Horror also published some standalone novels and story collections, but I don't own any of them, and probably won't ever bother. These two trilogies do it for me sufficiently. 
• Queue up and start the next physical copy gaming book, which is actually going to be Classic Horrors Revisited, a relatively slim softcover book by Paizo from back in the late 00s. January 2010. If I'm really on my reading game, I may even finish this. When I went out of town, I took three hardback 3.5 books, Stormwatch, Hordes of the Abyss, and Monster Manual II, but on a whim I also threw three Pathfinder Chronicles books; Classic Horrors Revisited, Undead Revisited, and Mythic Monsters Revisited (I think. I guess I need to make sure those are the ones that I grabbed, but I think so.) In the meantime, I also ordered and received a used copy of Darklands Revisited, so I went ahead and added a whole Pathfinder Chronicles/Setting (they rebranded partway through) trawl, which is quite lengthy. Sigh. More trawls. I'm going crazy with them. I can't put anything else in the queue until I finish what I have already off my shelf and in my backpack, but once I finish all of those, I'll turn to Races of Eberron, Into the Darklands and Darklands Revisited. But that won't be this weekend for sure, and probably not all next week either before I get all that done.
• I'd really like to finish the last of the Heirs of Ash novels, another Eberron trilogy that I'm reading on my Kindle app on my phone, before the end of the year. It'll go pretty fast once I just get it started, but I need to just get it started.

Honestly, I may get tired of reading, so the first two are the only "must dos" and even so, that's close to 200 pages of game book text. I may need to watch something after that just to cleanse the palate. 

Also, here'ssome revised Golarion Remixed bannesr, for use when I need one shortly.

Golarion Remixed - first steps

Sigh. I'm having trouble getting to a lot of sites. It looks like there's some kind of major Cloudfare outage. I hate the internet sometimes. I liked the internet of the 90s and 00s. Back when it wasn't full of corporate slop. Speaking of which, I was thinking about corporate slop with regards to WotC and their recent offerings. Although I'm not a huge fan of it, I do think that the 5e system is probably fine. It's probably better than my "beloved" 3e, honestly, although I'm obviously more familiar with 3e and understand it better. Plus, I'm currently re-reading lots of 3e books, so I'm feeling more charitable towards the system and its foibles now than I might otherwise feel. However, 5e has a definite trend wherein most of what it's done that's good, especially in the campaign adventures or books, which tend to be a huge chunk of what they're doing, is recycled. In this regard, they're not different than any other useless corporate slop factory, like Hollywood. In the last week or two we got a piss-poor Running Man remake (apparently, more faithful to the original story, which of course means that it sucks more. Suck it, Stephen King. You're not all that after all.) We had a mediocre Predator movie. Depending on how you count it, it's either the sixth or the eighth Predator movie (if you count the AVP movies) and one guy even references some obscure 9th movie that I've never heard of. Some animation on Hulu or something. In the 80s, we had good sci-fi genre movies, but they were unique, new and innovative. Today, they're still milking those same franchises, or trying to, to vastly diminishing returns with completely mediocre, forgettable products that are watered down beyond all reason. Almost nothing from Hollywood is original anymore, or innovative or even interesting, and only a few creators are even given the latitude to try something like that (Christopher Nolan, I guess? A few others here and there.) The Hollywood news is about how 2025, which was supposed to "save" the industry, has been incredibly disappointing, but hardly anyone wants to recognize (within the industry, anyway—pop culture pundits on YouTube are going crazy with this) what the obvious issue is; Hollywood has no creativity, their uncreative and banal and frankly kind of stupid management has their fingers in the product dumbing it down, playing it safe, and making everything turn into useless corporate slop which, at best, attempts merely to regurgitate a slop version of something that was successful a generation or two ago. 

WotC, of course, is doing the same thing, as noted. Their most popular, as near as I can tell, campaign is Curse of Strahd, which of course is a remake of the old Ravenloft module from 1983. Most of their campaigns are the same; repackaging of older classic material; Tales of the Yawning Portal, Tomb of Annihilation, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Dungeon of the Mad Mage, etc. They're mostly all repackaging of older material. Very little has been created that's actually original, and when they do, it's rarely interesting. Tales of the Radiant Citadel was—in theory—original, but in actuality, is a repetitive regurgitation of crappy corporate slop. I'm sure I'm missing something, but the only recent decently good (or at least reasonably well-regarded, as near as I can tell) adventure that's new is the Icewind Dale winter one. 

And all of this is within a narrowly constricted frame of reference to begin with. It's one thing to say that a module is innovative or original, but at the end of the day, it's a module. The format itself isn't innovative or original anymore, so you have limited capability to be innovative or original to begin with. The innovation and originality was all 40+ years ago when the concept of the module was formulated and there was some trial and error around how to actually do it effectively. Some of these early adventure paths, like what I'm reading now, were pretty good for what they were. They were reasonably well executed and high quality. But they weren't really all that innovative or original, except by comparison to what WotC is doing.

Now, outside of the big producers of content, there's plenty of good stuff going on. That's what happens when an industry gets to the point where its unable to actually serve its primary function anymore, especially hobbyist or entertainment industries; there's a cottage industry of independents and hobbyists who do better work than the professionals. WotC isn't completely useless, but they're just repackaging stuff from the 80s, mostly. Paizo is a little better, and Kobold Press, but I'd still suggest that the real interesting stuff isn't coming out of any of the businesses in Seattle. Green Ronin, as much as I like Freeport and the Freeport Trawl really kind of started the whole trawl business I'm going through, isn't great either—I'm noticing that they're pretty sloppy. Even when they have good ideas, they require a fair bit of rework. But Green Ronin is another split off of former WotC employees.

Anyway, I spent more time writing about that than I meant to. What I meant to talk about was what I'm going to do with Golarion Remixed. First of all, I have to point out that Eberron Remixed didn't radically rewrite anything. I mostly just adjusted things to be less proto-woke, more sword & sorcery and noir and less high fantasy and superheroes. My reworking of Ustalav into Timischburg, on the other hand, was more radical; I completely rearranged the geography, renamed everything; it's basically a completely different setting, albeit one with similar themes. So which am I going to go with for Golarion Remixed?

I'm pretty sure I'm going to lean into doing it like I did Eberron. If I incorporate Ustalav, which I probably will, it'll actually be Ustalav, not Timischburg. But the other problem I'll have is that there's more material to review than there was for Eberron, so it'll be difficult to do. Rather than "remix" each nation, I'll be much more likely to focus on nations that interest me, and maybe their immediate neighbors if that's relevant, so I'll end up with a weird patchwork of stuff that's been done and stuff that hasn't and probably won't be. Which is fine; technically, that's kind of how the development itself was done. Many nations never really went beyond their high level summary, until an adventure or adventure path was set there.

Sandpoint, the iconic Varisian starting town.

Which are the ones that I want to target as part of my first wave? My favorite nations in the Golarion setting are:

• Varisia
• Ustalav
• Osirion

So I'll definitely start there. However, that suggests some things too.

• Belkzen is between Varisia and Ustalav, so it probably needs to be done. Or at least mentioned.
• Cheliax and Taldor are vastly important in the inner sea region, and are pretty interesting. They are second wave ones to remix. Same for Absalom
• I also like some of the other "North African" nations, specifically Katapesh.
• There's a bunch of stuff that I probably need to talk about because they are in neighboring some of these. I wonder if I want to talk about, like Molthune, Nimrathas, Lastwall/Gravelands, etc. Honestly, I wonder if I even want all of them. I like the idea of old Taldor breaking in half between the "western Roman Empire" Cheliax and "Byzantine Empire" Taldor, but there are a bunch of other Taldan successor states. Too many, really, and I feel like they are kind of extraneous. So, I probably need to address what Paizo has done, and what I will do; if I ignore them, I should at least have a handwavey explanation for what I'm doing with some of the neighbors of the main ones I want to do.
• I never was a huge fan of the Underdark concept; I liked it, but didn't love it. Paizo's Darklands is probably the best "Underdark" I've seen, though, so I'll probably do that as part of the second wave too. I've got Into the Darklands and I ordered up a copy of Darklands Revisited which I had somehow missed, and it'll be in my hot little hands before I get that far.

Finally; I think it's worth pointing out that the setting had some major updates going from 1e to 2e; baseline Golarion vs. Lost Omens Golarion. Honestly, I'm mostly going with 1e Golarion because I know it better, but on the off-chance that some change is better than what came before, I'll adopt it. There were even more changes going from 2e to "Remastered" but I probably won't actually adopt many of those changes. Many of them, like the elimination of the drow entirely, were way too radical, and others, like the renaming of duergar or troglodytes are pointless to me, so I don't care.

Another thing that I can obviously confirm is that I'll be eliminating or at least changing a lot of the DEI NPCs and Iconics. There's no reason why some of these exotic women adventurers would be in the regions that they're shown in, honestly. Women being equivalent to men is ridiculous, and that particular stupid idea has naturally fallen into disfavor strongly after Paizo went all in on it. I don't have a problem with women PCs; they're exceptional, after all. But assuming that most security and fighter types are women when any idiot knows that they're not physically or psychologically equipped to stand toe-to-toe with men in a lot of those roles is very 2020. It was stupid in 2020 too, don't kid yourself, but nobody takes that idea seriously anymore. Women in administrative roles, like mayors and whatnot works a little better, but there's still way too many of them; it isn't even realistic in today's world, much less one modeled on the Medieval one.

Also, since Golarion's nations are largely based on real world nations, loosely, anyway, the idea of Medieval Persians (in their ethnic dress, no less) and Medieval Africans, Medieval Asians, etc. wandering around northern Europe is kind of silly; it just strikes me as unbelievable, as we don't have any reports of that happening at all. There are few enough reports of Europeans wandering around Asia, Africa or the Middle East during the Middle Ages, although to be fair some of the stuff isn't really Medieval; much of the Osirion stuff is easily represented by European re-discovery of Egypt in the 1800s, etc.

Plus, while I don't mind some diversity, especially in the iconics, who are supposed to represent all kinds of possible player configurations, lets not forget that this hobby is one invented by and largely still populated by white guys in North America and to a lesser extent Europe. WotC likes to crow about the "changing face of the hobby" but it's largely wishful thinking. While more black, Hispanic, Asian, etc. people are probably playing than before, and more theater kid girls and women are involved than before, let's not kid ourselves; the hobby is still a white guy hobby. More to the point, I'm a white guy, and this is my remixing, so naturally I'm going to make it more to my taste. Which happens, I believe, to align with the majority opinion. The idea that these multicultural, multicolored, multiethnic places that look a lot of medieval Europe are popular is clearly not true, or all of the fantasy streaming shows that really want to be the next Game of Thrones but don't know how to would be more successful than they are.

To be fair, they have more problems than just that. But it is one that's been remarked on by most.

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.

Golarion Remixed and Pantheon Option Added

First off, a diversion. I read a fair bit while traveling, because that's mostly what I do when traveling for business and not actually working. I rarely have time to do any significant site-seeing on business trips, so I mostly load up on books. I finished Salvatore's Exile, which I was about halfway through at the start of the trip, the second book in the Dark Elf prequel trilogy, and I also read Sojourn, the final book. I'd read these before; they were all published in the very early 90s, and I probably read them by the mid-90s at the latest. I remember liking them, and don't get me wrong; I did again, but I almost wish that I hadn't bought them, because now I have them, and I doubt I'll read them again. I think that prequels generally shouldn't be done. You already know where it's going to end up, because of the prequel is a neologism of sequel, i.e., the book (or movie, etc.) that takes place later was actually made first, and this is a sequel that takes place earlier. I'm convinced more and more that while there's always a strong desire to explore the origin of a popular character before he really became that character, it rarely works out well. The Star Wars prequels were disappointing. Solo was disappointing, and shouldn't have been made. Wolverine: Origin was OK, but Marvel were right to be suspicious of it. Ultimately, although it was pretty good and no doubt sold like crazy, it probably did more damage to the "brand" of Wolverine than anything else in the end. And here; Drizzt was a cool character. As Salvatore himself "discovered" while writing the original Icewind Dale trilogy, which was supposed to star Wulfgar as the protagonist, Drizzt ended up being a much more intriguing character, and was the real break-out star of the series, and of his writing as a whole. But seeing him as he was before he was the character that we know was mostly kept afloat by the—at the time, still—exotic environment of the Underdark and the dark elf society, which was more intriguing than Drizzt as a teenager or whatever.

But I already discussed this somewhat in my brief mention of having finished the first book of the trilogy, Homeland; rather, what struck me this time, although again, it's hardly revelatory, just something that struck me particularly this time around, was that neither Drizzt nor Wulfgar, despite being indubitably D&D characters created for a D&D setting, and statted out in various D&D products, don't behave anything like D&D characters in most respects as you watch their bildungsroman in The Crystal Shard and this trilogy in particular. Rather, they start out as exceptional individuals, who go through what amounts to little more than a Rocky-style training montage, and then they're superlative characters who change very little over the course of multiple books after that. Certainly they change very little in terms of powers, abilities or capabilities; I don't mean to imply that they don't have character development. But it is nothing at all like the progression of levels in a D&D game. It just doesn't work very well, does it? The whole leveling thing is a gamism that doesn't resemble anything in the mediums which supposedly informed the game. You don't see anything like leveling in Conan or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. They may learn, grow and age, but they don't "level up" or anything at all like that. James Bond doesn't "level up" (or have a backstory either, for that matter) he just is and we like him as he is. 

Anyway, I dunno. I kind of like leveling in my own games, but I also like flat power curves and more "static" characters. Static at least in the sense that they don't have some crazy power curve, but they just kind of are, and things that happen to increase their capabilities are more in line with things that happen in real life; acquiring materiel that would give them more capabilities, learning something new through study, getting promoted or otherwise creating a network of relationships that offer support, etc. I'm starting to lean more and more into the house rule of smoothing the leveling and minimizing its obviousness, if not eliminating it altogether

Secondly, Paizo. I've been reading and finding lots of stuff on Paizo and the Golarion setting, and watching YouTube videos by MythKeeper and stuff. It's an interesting setting. To use it, I'd still have to make lots of changes. I like the frontier "Varisia" region quite a bit, for example, but I hate Kaer Maga, the "City of Strangers" and I'd have to swap some other city in its place entirely. I'm not a huge fan of the rune magic themes of ancient Thassilon, with their Seven Deadly Sins stuff either, nor am I a huge fan of Deliverance-style ogres (which I honestly find more and more offensive the more I encounter that particular stereotype) or the "Against the Giants" vibe of the fourth installment (the one I just finished) or their take on goblins, honestly. I like the more honest and "playing-it-straight" vibe of goblins in D&D rather than an attempt to hijack them into comic relief, or at least dark silliness. Goblins in Golarion are more like the gremlins of the Gremlins movie than they are like goblins of D&D or Lord of the Rings. They even kind of look like them.

What struck me about Pathfinder, especially as I started to find out about the changes made from 1e to 2e, and even moreso the changes from 2e to the Remastered Project, was that people who went to Paizo in 2007-9 or so often cited the reason for doing so that 4e didn't resemble D&D enough, and it made too many changes to the mechanics and especially to the lore of the game. So, they stuck with Pathfinder, which felt like just another setting—albeit one with high production and writing values, and one still strongly supported—of D&D. Paizo in the early days was more similar to Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms than 4e was, or even 3.5's own Eberron setting. But Golarion of today, post Remastered Project, is less like D&D than 4e was in terms of lore, and honestly, has a lot of similarities to 4e in terms of mechanics, in many ways. It's interesting how the tables turn. I think it's a case of the boiled frog analogy that people love to refer to; 4e was too many changes too fast for most people, but honestly, many of its ideas were good ideas. Many of its mechanics have wormed their way into Pathfinder and 5e and the whole modern ecosystem of games, for instance, and many of its lore changes (which I was always a fan of relative to the "traditional" lore as represented in its later stages by 3e and again in many ways by 5e). I wonder if many of those people who hated the 4e lore are perfectly comfortable now with Pathfinder Remastered's lore or not.

Anyway, I'm thinking of doodling a bit with Varisia like I did with Timischburg. That was my attempt to make a "fake Ustalav", and I think I'd like a fake Varisia too. Varisia may not be my favorite single element of the Golarion setting, but then again, it might be. It's a good one. In some ways, the Hill Country is an even more mundane version of Varisia, and I've deliberately added two city-states that were inspired in many ways by the rivalry between Korvosa and Magnimar in my own Garenport and Barrowmere. I can re-do some of the geography, rename the Hill Country and add some more Varisia-like elements to it, and make an alternate setting that includes some traditional D&D-like races, sort of like my High Fantasy X project, such as it was, was. The draft map I sketched up for High Fantasy X was more like Eberron meets Heroes of Might & Magic III, but there's no reason not to have more than one setting for the game. I like creating settings for its own sake, after all. This one will be more explicitly Golarion Remixed, and maybe I'll use that tag, which I haven't done much with, to explore how I'd change elements of it. 

Whatever I do as part of my "Golarion Remixed" project, it'll probably be more radical than my Eberron Remixed project. Eberron feels more like a single setting with multiple areas in it, while Golarion feels almost like a patchwork of settings that are connected, but for any given campaign, you're not really expected to use more than one of the elements. Maybe two at the most. A campaign set in Varisia is not going to go to Absalom or Katapesh, for instance. Each area has its own tone and theme. If all that makes any sense.

Finally, I also want to have the alternative of using fantasy deities, a mythological pantheon, even if I'm not sure if I prefer that, or not. But certainly, it will help D&D players adjust to my more esoteric tastes if I wean them in by making games I run resemble what they're expecting just a little more. Anyway, here's my full list of gods that I'd use for High Fantasy X, Golarion Remixed (maybe), Eberron Remixed (maybe) and even as an alternative in Old Night if I wanted to do it that way.

Sol Invictus - sun god (as you'd expect) with a martial aspect. More like Pelor than like Apollo. Originally a Roman god.

Cernunnos, the Horned King - nature god from Gaulish/Celtic origin, with antlers. Not super friendly.

Summanus the Thunderer - an obscure Roman god. I'm less likely to go with the "god of xxx" kind of thing; in real mythology, gods were just characters, and they didn't necessarily belong to domains and spheres of influence as much as we like to make them be. Thor, for instance, was never once called the God of Thunder, or even the Thunderer in any Norse text. He did have a hammer that thundered when he smote with it, but he was just an adventurer Norse god with a quick temper who was very strong, heroic, and featured in more stories than most. But I agree that for D&D there probably needs to be some element of that. 

Mithras - another late-appearing Roman god, famous for his mystery cult that was popular among the legions and the foederati, so he's often considered a martial god.

Chernavog, the Dark One - a Slavic god, although I've spelled it slightly differently than normal, who also happens to be the character from the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence of Fantasia. I consider him a pretty typical dark lord style figure. 

Veles, the Sly Mage - both a trickster figure, and a god of magic of sorts; Veles is also a Slavic god originally.

Tellus, the Earth-Mother - an old Greek or Roman spelling of Terra. Pretty typical Mother Earth type of goddess.

The Gray Sisters: Wyrd, Verthand, and Skuld - The Gray Sisters is usually a literal translation of the Graeae, which were Greek (famous for their interaction with Perseus, if you've watched Clash of the Titans lately) but I've used names that are more similar to Anglo-Saxon versions of the Norse Norns. Obviously they are both old Indo-European reflections of the same idea anyway, since the Graeae and the Norns are almost identical. Goddesses of fate, divination, etc. but with a darker, edgier tone than some might have had otherwise. 

Nodens, the Silver-Handed; Lord of the Hunt - A Celtic British god, also known by his Irish name Nuada or Nuadha, although the name Nodens itself is familiar to many gamers from Lovecraft. A huntsman and fisherman, he's kind of like the iconic ranger, maybe.

Brigantia, the Mistress of Victory - a poorly attested Celtic goddess. Well, actually she's fairly well-attested in terms of figurines, but we know little about her. Not unlike Nike, the Greek Goddess of Victory, and also often conflated with the Romans with Minerva (Athena). I'd probably see her as the unlikeable girlboss of the gods that the other gods either are annoyed by, or are constantly putting in her place, although she's lacking in self-awareness enough to realize it.

Epona - Gaulish goddess of horses. Maybe some elements of Artemis too; a weird, wandering loner of a girl who prefers the company of animals, especially horses, to anyone else.

Sirona, the Healer - another poorly known Celtic goddess (I'm using lots of them, if you didn't notice) but I'll call her the pretty stereotypical Florence Nightingale goddess that D&D pantheons seem to always have.

Tzovinar, Daughter of the Seas - an Armenian goddess. I just like the name and the title that came with her. I was thinking of using Thetis, a Greek chthonic goddess of the seas, and the bad guy from Clash of the Titans, but I like this name better. I need to mix up a few more goddesses, because I'm wont otherwise to ignore them and make the whole pantheon a big ole sausage party.

Mokosh, the Swamp Mother - I can't even remember where I got this name. But a hag goddess in a swamp sounded kind of cool.

Volturnus, the Father of the River - I thought about using Father Ren, or Father Rhine from the Germanic tribes, but I relented and went with this more "generic" Roman name. An aquatic god, obviously, and maybe someone who's frequently irritated by Mokosh and Tzovinar.

Ceres - a Roman goddess of the hearth, agriculture, marriage and domesticity in general, often equated with Demeter, and who picked up the same story of Demeter and Persephone and Hades, except the names were Ceres and Proserpina and Dis Pater in those roles to the Romans.

Dagon - a dark god of the ocean, who borrows more from the Lovecraft and D&D demon lord stuff than from mythology per se.

Orcus - another name for Pluto to the Romans, but of course, he's got a long history in D&D which I'll also be borrowing; a dark demon-god, associated with undeath. He may be more like Orcus as Tenebrous, though—an undead thing. Maybe like Nagash from Warhammer in fact.

Thanatos - another alternate name for either Hades or his realm to the Greeks, although in D&D of course, this is Orcus' layer of the Abyss. I'll call him a dark god of night and murder, maybe not too unlike Zon-Kuthon of Golarion; corrupted by the Dark Tapestry, or Far Realm, or Outer Darkness, or Void Beyond, or whatever I want to call it. Conceptually, they're all the same thing. This Lovecraftian corruption possibly places him in a similar role to Tharizdun from D&D.

Zaltys, the Serpent - a snake god. The name comes from Lithuanian, and refers to the home snakes that they used to keep for whatever reason. The Teutonic crusaders who brought Christianity with the sword to the Baltic peoples killed a lot of their snakes. Elements of Yig, Ydersius, Sertrous and more

Nwt, the Sky-mother - an Egyptian goddess of the night sky.

Ashtar of the Sacred Groves - A Semitic goddess, usually known as either Ishtar or Astarte depending on the language, but I've split the difference. Infamous for her sacred groves and temple heirodules, or "sacred prostitutes" in real life. 

The Old Men of the Sea; Manann, Thaumant, and Halios Geron - odd spellings of Greek gods and one Irish god of the Sea. I thought it'd be cool to have them be a trio rather than just one. 

I've also got all my Lovecraftian entities from earlier posts, but I won't propose them as part of the pantheon that PCs could conceivably worship.

Golarion Best and Worst (according to me)

I've been poking around in the setting of Golarion again recently, the Pathfinder setting. I should point out that the only Golarion setting book that I own in physical form is the one that was published prior to the Pathfinder game, however, and it is written to coincide with the 3.5 version of the D&D rules. Or, as Green Ronin calls it with their copy-cat d20 logo, the 3rd Era. I'm sort of familiar with what has happened to the setting since then, however, including some major changes to a few areas. The Worldwound was closed, Tar-Baphon has reappeared and blown up Lastwall, etc. I'll admit; I'm not really a fan of making changes to settings like that, but then again, most of the lands that were changed were ones that I wasn't all that fond of anyway.

I still might do a Golarion Remixed similar to my Eberron Remixed activity. But don't hold your breath. I've got a lot of projects ongoing at any given time in my hobbies, and I don't give myself much in the way of deadlines or formal project management. Unlike Eberron, however, it'll be a bit more difficult to focus. Eberron, while world-sized in scope, didn't really do all that much with more than one continent, and the main setting book settled for simply making offhand references to continents like Sarlona, Argonnessen, or even Xendrik, for that matter. Khorvaire was far and away the focus.

Golarion is quite a bit bigger in scope. While you can blow off some regions as "supplemental" like Tien Xia or Arcadia, or the Crown of the World, etc. there are still two main continents to cover, and each is broken up into at least as many constituent regions as Khorvaire, but mostly more. Many more, in the case of Avistan. Also, in Khorvaire, while you have different constituent regions with a different tone and flavor, they're all meant to work together a little better. Golarion is designed so that each constituent region is almost a mini-setting in its own right, and almost works better if you set an entire game within that region, so you can focus on the tone and feel that it brings. Certainly most of their adventure paths have done so. I don't think either Eberron nor Golarion's approach is a better idea, they simply serve different purposes. Eberron has loads of fast-travel options, and because political intrigue is a major element of the setting, being able to travel across the continent and do stuff in various areas is a defining feature. Golarion is meant to be a setting that has a place for all kinds of different games, stories and tones, depending on the group and adventure path that you're doing, so being broken up into numerous mini-settings works best for how they intended to use it and for it to be used.

Anyway, not all of the constituent elements are created equal. Some got little attention over the years. Some deserved little attention. Some were just weird or esoteric ideas. Some are more playable than others. And some just attract a broader base while some focus on narrow interests that relatively few gamers will have. Some make ideological/political statements of sorts (usually among my least favorite). I'm going to take, for Avistan (and then maybe I'll do it also for Garund if the post doesn't balloon out too big) my three favorite and three least favorite constituent elements and briefly discuss why they work for me or why they don't. Fair warning; I'm among the most opinionated guys on the internet, and I'm only talking about what I like and don't like. You may well disagree with my assessment. Frankly, I don't think I really care. Make your own blog post if you have a different take.

AVISTAN

Top Three Regions

Varisia: Varisia is probably the best developed of all of the regions in Golarion with loads of setting books that focus on portions of it, and by far the most adventure paths set here. It's got a kind of classic D&D frontier region vibe to it that works quite well too; no big states, but rather a handful of minor city-states exerting varying degrees of control over small settlements and wilderness. It's also got a lot of the classic frontier small-town Medieval life, threatened (potentially) by savages or other dangers. Varisia just has more classic adventuring opportunity than any other region. I also like the potential for intrigue and skullduggery between factions loyal to the two major city-states, Magnimar and Korvosa, and the potential that brings. Riddleport is a bit of an nice outlier, offering a more condensed frontier vibe with pirates and relative lawlessness. Kaer Maga, on the other hand, is a stupid idea that was then executed even more poorly, making an already dumb concept even worse. It's best ignored entirely, if you can swing it.

Ustalav: Little wonder that the only region that I've "adapted" so far—for my CULT OF UNDEATH project—was Ustalav. The vibe and tone of this element is meant to be very classic, Transylvanian Gothic horror. Although more limited than Varisia because of its strong tone, that very strong tone is what makes it a potential favorite among fans of implementing that tone. Surprisingly, it seems to have maintained its integrity as a setting element even after the rise of Tar-Baphon (again) from the grave in recent setting developments. Probably because it's one of the better and more popular elements in the setting, I would guess.

Absalom: Absalom is the quintessential urban setting for a D&D game; glittering and fanciful on the surface, but just underneath, a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Absalom also has a strong tone; an urban tone, which tends to gravitate towards political infighting, intrigue, skullduggery, and crime. But it's also got its moments of glory, if you will, and some of the most iconic elements of the setting are located here, like the Pathfinder Society headquarters, etc. Sadly, as soon as you get out of the city (and often while still in it) you get lambasted with quirky (and not in a good way) D&Disms, like odd dungeons lurking right off the beaten path, and stuff like that. But that stuff is usually left as offhand references that can easily be ignored.

Bottom Three Regions

Druma: Like most of my least-favorite regions, Druma is dominated by a cultural high concept that poisons its usefulness. The cultural high concept—that everyone is obsessed with trade and greed—is so strong, that it begs the question of what any normal person would ever do or see in the nation in the first place, and why they would ever be there, including the PCs themselves. It also makes dealing with anyone from Druma a particularly tedious one-note bore.

Razmiran: Also ruined by a high concept too narrow to be of much use, Razmiran is obsessed with a cult to a guy who is pretending to be a god but isn't. It seems like some anti-religious SJW nutjob came up with this idea, and tried to push it into being, when it just isn't organic enough to be self-sustaining. Not only that, if true, it's insulting to normal people everywhere. You do want to give individual regions something that sets them apart and makes them feel different than other regions, but if that is just an obsessive cult-like ideology of everybody which defines literally everything about the region and screws it up, that's not very useful for gaming, or very fun. 

Numeria: This one is a little different; it's a primitive, barbaric land that has a crashed spaceship in the middle of it. It's a strange concept, and I know why they did it (because Eric Mona was a big fan of Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, basically) but it's too narrow and esoteric a concept to be appealing to most, I think. Me included; I don't like weird space opera elements in my sword & sorcery very much. 

Three Regions That Could be Great or Terrible

Lastwall: For the most part, these regions never really had much development; no full adventure paths were set there, and they didn't, therefore, really materialize. They have the potential to be good, or to flop hard, depending on what the development with them would end up looking like. Laswall (and Mendev) probably just had too narrow of a concept to actually be worth spending time there. They were almost placeholder high concepts. It's to little surprise that Lastwall was blown up and turned into the Gravelands, or whatever they're calling it, and as the Worldwound was closed, Mendev also ceased to have a reason to exist and just kind of dispersed. 

Andoran: Given that Andoran is kind of supposed to be an America-like setting in terms of ideology, it has the potential to be pretty cool. However, from what little I've seen of it, the writers don't actually understand what America is and were way too heavy-handed with the liberal SJW nonsense, and like SJWs everywhere, they turned all of the inhabitants into Karen-cultists who run around telling everyone else what to do and trying to make everyone else govern themselves the way that they do. I'd suggest that this was on its way towards quickly becoming one of the worst three, but they just never got around to actually making it so. And it could, in fact, be salvaged pretty easily because they didn't do enough with it to spike it too badly to be redeemable.

Galt: Another nation that's probably too focused on too narrow of a concept to really be very useful, Galt is the French Revolution, except that inexplicably it has lasted for literally generations now. Ironically and laughably, the SJWs who now run Paizo are lacking enough self-awareness to recognize that the horrors of the French Revolution are the inevitable result of their ideology, which is basically the same as that of the Revolutionary French. But I honestly just have no idea what to do with Galt. If it were a more recent revolution that was still playing out, that'd be one thing, but after fifty years; c'mon—its not sustainable that mass mob murder would go on that long without running out of steam... not to mention people to murder. 

GARUND

Top Three Regions

Osirion: Much of Garund is saddled with political commentary on colonialism, which is the latest fad of the haters of Western Civilization. My own viewpoint on "colonization" by Western civilization is similar to that in The Life of Brian routine: "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?" Brought peace." "Peace? Shut up!" That said, the vibe isn't as strong with Osirion, because it's deliberately trying to be Ancient Egypt brought up to date. There's also a strong Raiders of the Lost Ark theme to it too. 

Katapesh: Katapesh has that same kind of lawless "wretched hive" feel of Riddleport or Absalom, with both city and wilderness, but with a strong Orientalism vibe to make it more exotic, rather than more familiar pirates and brigands of Medieval Europe. I don't know that it's truly unique, but it's still pretty cool and one of my favorite elements of Garund.

Sargava: Sargava is meant to be seen as the bad-guy Colonials, imposing themselves on the poor innocent natives, but it comes across more as a beacon of light in a vast cloud of savagery and darkness all around them (see the Life of Brian reference just above, too). The Serpent's Skull adventure path gives some more info on this area, on top of the slim book that came out some years ago, and although pruning of the ideological ax-grinding elements still needs to be done, it does show how Sargava could be a great place, actually, and a base camp into an exotic wilderness area.

Bottom Three Regions

Rahadoum: Yet another cultural high concept that sees this nation in the grips of a cult; in this case, an anti-cult; religion of any kind of outlawed, and everyone is a rebel who refuses to worship even gods that they acknowledge exist. Non serviam. While what little information there is on this land is presented as somewhat positive, this is outright Satanic in nature, even more so than Cheliax, if less on-the-nose in some ways, and I have no interest in it.

Jalmeray: Not only does this location offer little opportunity for adventure, but I personally just have little interest in a place who's only schtick is "it's fantasy/mythical India! Sorta." It almost deliberately has little to no ties to the rest of the setting, and there's no reason to go there except site-seeing, which isn't all that interesting when it's just verbal description anyway.

Shackles: The Shackles is a region that I had great hopes for, but because their interpretation of it was a patchwork of completely unconnected and in fact disparate concepts all thrown in willy-nilly, its one that ultimately greatly disappointed me. None of the ideas were necessarily bad, although most were very derivative, but they should have focused on a few of them instead of the spray and pray approach of throwing everything and hoping gamers would at least find something to like.

Three Regions That Could be Great or Terrible

Sodden Lands: There could have been something really interesting going on here, but they just didn't get around to doing anything other than referring in offhand fashion to various weird exotic alien lizard and amphibian races. I still think that a storm-lashed jungle has some great potential, but it seems to have been mostly ignored, and what little has been done with it has been thus far uninspired.

Mwangi Expanse: The Mwangi Expanse actually does have a fair bit of development, but the ideas in it are pretty hit and miss. Some of them are fantastic, exotic, and fascinating. Some of them are banal, or ax-grindy with anti-Western Civilization hatred and insults. It can be great if you focus on the good elements and completely ignore or excise the bad elements. 

Geb and Nex: We don't actually know quite enough about Geb or Nex to do much with them. And yes; they are two separate regions, but their whole concept is intertwined with each other, so I think they serve as one sub-setting of Golarion, where you'd be meant to interact with both. I also don't really like that they're meant explicitly to be the "high level" sub-setting. That said, there seemed to be some pretty cool ideas here, but they just didn't ever get the development that they needed. Probably because they couldn't figure out how to set a whole adventure path in them, because they were "high level." Should have thought of that and had more low level adventuring opportunities. 

In general, even doing this small quick-n-dirty survey, has convinced me that if I do a Golarion Remixed similar to my Eberron Remixed, it will require that I cut a bunch of areas. I may not literally cut them, just merge some of the areas that I don't like in to neighboring areas, and downplay the strange high concept one-notes that are too strong to be useable. A cult of anti-religious Satanists is fine, but a whole nation defined by that cult? No. Rahadoum therefore becomes some hinterlands to Osirion, and a place where such a cult lingers either underground or in the wilderness. 

And so on and so forth.

There's also more that needs to be developed. This wasn't entirely untrue for Eberron; I'm in particular thinking of Valenar and Q'Barra as undeveloped places, but there are more of them here. Maybe that's OK; maybe such places should be left deliberately blank or high level to be filled in as needed and not before. Schrödinger's setting elements, if you will. You want to know what's there? Go there and find out. 

Anyway, the point is that a Golarion Remixed project seems like it might have to be a bit bigger than an Eberron Remixed project. Especially if I do something like I did for Eberron Remixed, and adapt it out of the D&D races into the Dark Fantasy X races. Curiously, although Eberron is a D&D setting and technically Golarion is not (technically), the reality is that Golarion is much more D&Dish than Eberron. One of the main reasons I remixed Eberron in the first place is that I felt like its concept was being held back by its attachment to the D&D system and the D&D paradigm. Golarion, on the other hand, is way too steeped in it to make the Remix anything other than an odd interpretation.

Doesn't mean it won't be fun to do, but I'd really rather finish by 5x5s before delving too deeply in to it anyway.