Golarion- fantasy earth

[Spuddles]

I have been playing in the PF campaign setting for maybe the past 8 months, and have really come to enjoy fantasy earth. There are analogue civilizations on the Africa continent, India continent, a trade route through the cold barbarian mountains to the China continent. The venus planet is the home of elves and a race of hot psychic catgirls. There's a moon and a jupiter and a mars, too, and starspawn like cthulhu who fell from the stars and are imprisoned below the surface of the world.

Does anyone else like Golarion? Find it horribly contrived?

[CaladanMoonblad]

Meh. Howard did it back in the 1930s with Hyboria.

[kardar233]

I dislike Golarion because of its treatment of Evil races. They all seem to be stereotyped toward pointless acts of idiotic villainy, and apparently are all naturally this way without any particularly solid explanation.

I do like the mythology of Asmodeus and his brother (whose name I can't recall) and how they created the world and all that. If I ever end up playing a PF Paladin, it'll be one of Sarenrae.

The myths of Rovagug and their iteration of the Tarrasque are fairly good. I liked the Yeats reference. I think it's quite silly that the Orcs generally worship him, though.

[Yora]

I am not a fan of Golarion, because it's virtually human-only and makes heavy use of fantasy counterpart culture. There is fantasy Egypt, fantasy Scandinavia, fantasy Russia, fantasy Africa, fantasy French revolution, and so on.
These are two things that simply don't do it for me, so there isn't really much of interest in the setting for me. (Though I still like to read the occasional bit about the Kinorm Kingdom/Irrisien/Mammoth Realm region.)

I actually started a thread on this on the paizo forum (http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2pw5k&page=1?Why-do-you-love-Golarion) about a week ago, which resulted in quite interesting results.
It's apparently not so much that people have different perceptions of the world, but that some people enjoy playing in a world that makes heavy use of well established archetypes, and other people don't.

[Spuddles]

I am not a fan of Golarion, because it's virtually human-only and makes heavy use of fantasy counterpart culture. There is fantasy Egypt, fantasy Scandinavia, fantasy Russia, fantasy Africa, fantasy French revolution, and so on.

Haha, that's almost exactly why I like it. Well, except for the marginalization of any non-human races. I'm not a fan of that.

But having everything analogous makes learning the world so much easier. If you are familiar with real life, then it's pretty easy to understand Ustalav (fantasy transylvania) or Orisian (fantasy egypt).

I think Eberron is the only other fantasy setting I like. Greyhawk is gygax touching himself while thinking about pole arms and ye olde europe. It has some cool stories/concepts in it (Age of Worms, Against the Giants/Lolth, Temple of Elemental Evil, Tomb of Horrors). FR is just... freakin stupid. I like a lot of the mechanics, monsters and dungeons from FR, but the way the setting is put together really rubs me the wrong way.

From the other thread:

For me, this is my world. I was late coming to RPGs, but I got here about the time 3rd rolled around. By that time all the other settings had been out, been played in. Mysteries solved. Heroes died, Villains conquered. But Golarion, I got in on the ground floor.

I think that's why I like it, too. FR has 20,000? years of history, all played out and a million books written about it. Golarion is actively being fleshed out.


I think the big draw for me is how broad the inspirations for the setting pull. Rather than the Western European Medieval feel that most generic settings fall back on, Golarion draws from a much broader stretch of cultures, time periods and literary themes, while managing not to become niche in the way settings like Dark Sun and Ebberon really only work well for Dune-esqe desert-punk, and urban fantasy campaigns, respectively. The vastness of the different cultural parallels just give the world a much larger and much grander feel than most settings.

This, too.