Understanding the Boneyard

[Palanan]

My copy of “The Dead Roads” just arrived, which is the first book in the Tyrant’s Grasp AP, and I’m having trouble understanding the details of the setup.

Apparently the adventure starts when the PCs wake up dead, which sounds promising, but I’m not clear on where exactly they are when they wake up. I gather they’re in the Boneyard, which is something vaguely afterlifey; but they seem to be interacting with physical objects and gathering physical treasure—lamps and crowbars at the very beginning, then regular magic items later on.

Now, I know that the PCs aren’t actually dead, owing to the obols which have pinned their souls to their bodies; but I’m not clear about the rest of the Boneyard. Is it physical, spiritual, ethereal, dreamstate? On the Pathfinder Wiki it’s described as “a vast necropolis…teeming with the souls of the dead awaiting judgement,” but I’m still not clear if this is strictly physical or more, you know, shadowy and soul-ish.

I wouldn’t think souls would need crowbars, but there they are, right on p. 5. So what am I missing about the Boneyard?

[the_david]

You can usually find the answers to questions like this one on paizo.com. (https://paizo.com/threads/rzs42hdx?1-The-Dead-Roads) They're getting a lot more questions like this one and so they also have all the answers.

[Palanan]

Okay, thanks. I usually find that I get much better answers here on the Playground, but that does look like a handy thread.

[Florian]

Hm. The Boneyard, along with the River of Souls, is a core part of the whole Golarion cosmology.

Ok, it serves a dual function: It is the main True Neutral outer plane, it is also the main point were more or less all souls from the Material Plane are processed and sent to their final destination.

Understand it a bit like this: The eternal city of Axis (LN) is the basis, the Spire rises from the center of it, with the Boneyard (TN) forming the top, with the Maelstrom (CN) being the sky above it. As with any Outer Plane, it is as well a physical landscape as well as a spiritual/alignment representation.