I love the world of Golarion, Paizo’s default game world for the Pathfinder RPG. I was a subscriber to basically everything that came out for Pathfinder first edition and have been running a Pathfinder campaign for some 15 years now (and played in many of their Adventure Paths myself). PF2e wasn’t different enough to convince me I should spend thousands more dollars on the same content again, but the Lost Omens line is about Golarion world content, and I buy those from time to time.
And since my current game is about pirates traveling from place to place, the idea of the Pathfinder Lost Omens Travel Guide, which “presents the highlights of the Inner Sea region to help any and all curous travelers plan where to go and what to see,” was super intriguing. I got it recently and read it cover to cover! I assumed what I’d get would be like a travel guide – here’s what to expect of the sights and sounds, but also practical details, of going to various places in Golarion.
Bottom line up front – it’s OK. There is some great content and some complete misses. And that’s a challenge – as a hardback with 124 pages of actual content for $40, I’m paying a buck for every three pages so each three pages should be worth a buck to me in content. Some groups of pages met that burden and some did not. It’s very uneven. There were some chunks of great Golarion content and then there are chunks of content that I can only call “generic medieval fantasy for dummies.” Let’s get into it.
I got in a bad mood early reading this book but it picks up later. We start with a two-page “introduction” spread containing zero content written by, not a Pathfinder whose name we know from somewhere, but some rando fake fantasy editor.
Time & The Calendar
The book starts with a six page section on “Time & The Calendar”. It names the days and months – something we already know from the world guide – and adds a little bit of helpful flavor, like which day is usually a market day. It confusingly adds “common names” for the months. “Abadius, alternately called Prima.” Alternately by… Who? Why? Where? We’ve been using the primary names for decades in Pathfinder world now, so this a weird add that doesn’t expand our direct usability of the world. Do they use these different names in… Garund? Are they formal “Latin Church” type names the educated would use vs. peasant terms? Who knows. Then a quick justification for the laziness of using the same calendar across the world (There was a war! People agreed!) and then, super frustratingly, some alternate calendars like the Tian Xia Imperial calendar that date from a different year. OK that’s cool. What year? Who cares, apparently.
This is a gripe I’m going to come back to. World content that is actually *useful to players, in play* has some very specific requirements. If we’re going to say “Ah the guy from Tian Xia says back in IC 123”, we should be able to say “oh and that’s equivalent to AR 2500.” But this book just doesn’t bother with that. GURPS was the game that really got this right. I didn’t play a lot of GURPS but I own 20-30 of their sourcebooks because they mastered the art of taking fictional content and boiling it down to what you needed in play. GURPS Conan tells you how much a broadsword costs in Scythia and what differences you, a person wandering in the world, are going to see and encounter. I would get GURPS supplements when planning to run a game in that setting in another game system because their value was distilling the fiction down to usable, tangible specifics relevant to PCs exploring a world.
Then we have a quick historical timeline – again, from other sources, without any kind of effort to make it “what today’s peasant understands” or the like, and then time constructs broken down by race. (We’re supposed to call “races” “ancestries” now but bah to that.) More than 50% of the pages have big graphical sidebars that are not super useful.
Everyday Life
Next, a sizable 12-page section on “Everyday Life.” Here’s where we get into some trouble. Much of this is “Life in a Medieval Village Lite” generalities about what some abstract generic Golarion medieval European does in their life, but less focused on historical realism and more what a fantasy anime village does. “Get up early to tend the livestock!” “People on the water fish!” “Nomads travel!” is the level of detail here. No Golarion insight, like “here’s what a peasant in Andoren’s day is like vs a Bonuwat fisherman vs a Varisian nomad” – nope. Next is a long section on languages, which has the helpful point “Common/Taldane and Tien are trade languages commonly spoken, but not well, because people tend to speak their actual local language.” I said that in one sentence but they took half a page. Then a bit on ancient languages, which I’m not sure how it’s relevant to the alleged travel guide format. Next we have some more generic fantasy content – a full page spread on a “rural home” and an “urban home.” You know, a generic one that is certainly identical across an entire world. These helpfully explain what a “Yard” and a “Bedroom” are. Next, a couple pages on what “Rural Life” is like (is that not “Everyday Life” in Golarion?). This has some dross like “did you know there’s not as many restaurants out in the sticks” but some actual value, just padded. “Out in the sticks people tend to trade in barter instead of paying each other coins, but they’ll take yours” is another sentence you can replace a half page with, and “people tend to not be monotheistic, but revere the various gods in charge of whatever they’re doing at the time; farming, hunting, dying, sailing, etc.” same thing. Like, great clarification, just padded to all hell. And then we have an actual useful little bit saying what a house costs.
Then we have a two page spread on “Rural fashion” indicating that our generic rural peasant might wear a “Hat” and a “Work Apron” and if they fish, perhaps “Fishing Galoshes.” This is where I started to get angry and fear that I’d dumped $40 on one of those shitty big-board books you find in the discount section of bookstores that are like “a castle, for kids!” kind of things.
We run through the same lengthy content for Urban Life, which has more restaurants and more monotheism, and a fashion spread, which indicates more of a love for parasols and pouches than the dirt people. But make sure and ethically source your hat feathers because “the collection of feathers can do a lot of damage to bird populations, and activist groups have begun to protest them.” No I am not kidding. I mean, I guess since slavery and racism and all the other evils have been solved we may as well. (In the interest of PC-ness, everyone including the most evil of evil realms all outlawed slavery in the last couple years between Pathfinder 1e and 2e.)
Festivals & Holidays
I assume it’s because of assigning out sections to different authors and not a lot of time spent editing, but we had some festivals in the calendar section and now we have another semi-redundant 8 page festival section. This one’s OK – it notes a bunch of holidays and festivals with actual locations/deities/context on them, which is great, but with no information on any of them that would be useful to someone traveling there.
There’s no excuse for that. I went to Japan last summer and the travel guide packed in 5x as much information (these 8 hardback pages equal 16 real travel guide pages, which manage to give you a little about what a given festival may actually entail and look like and be about). They do add a little flavor in the 6 pages they use to show some dress for a couple of the festivals, but the density and focus is a problem. In a full page spread on the Cayden Cailean festival of Merrymead, we have a random super dark piece of art that indicates a reveler may well have a “handkerchief.”
But how would you do this better, you ask? OK so near me in Galveston, TX, they have a Christmastime “Dickens on the Strand” festival:
Dickens on The Strand is Galveston’s annual winter holiday street festival bursting with live entertainment on multiple streets, including strolling carolers, roving musicians, bagpipers, jugglers, and a crowd of entertainers and costumed revelers, all dressed in period formal Victorian garb like formal dresses and stovepipe hats and eating cold-weather treats like roasted chestnuts and drinking mulled wine.
Bam. Concise but focuses on what you’ll actually do, what it’ll feel and look like (cold! festive! music in the air! fake old-timey formality!). And you could fit 5 of those (easily) per page so you get more coverage – the problem with a book like this is if your campaign is set in place X and focuses on deities Y and so on, the chance that one of the 4 padded out holidays they cover is going to be relevant is low. Do 30 in that format, and you’re good to go. Or dig more into each one, but dang the content per dollar is low in this section. I get art is expensive, but blowing up a drawing of a copper piece to take a full 1/8 page spread just makes me spend more of my money on it too.
Trade
And that segues us into the Trade section. The church of Abadar works to validate contracts and balance interest rates across the Inner Sea. Some of this is great, some of it gets into weird “fantasy modern”. (They have things to detect if goods have been teleported somewhere to try to profit! No one would want to buy teleported goods! I’m glad we have a super high magic solution to all those level 10 wizards trying to profit off teleporting lingonberries to the Mwangi Expanse!).
They have a full page spread with 4 coins – which is nice, it’s nice to have an example, oh look here’s what an Absalom platinum piece looks like and is called. But again, it’d be better with then a list of 10 other things they’re called in other places and maybe a “and they are all little bars instead of coins in Druma” or something.
A two page spread, one page of which is a map, has trade routes of the Inner Sea. Now we have the first truly useful worldbuilding. (I knew most of this from extensive research I did planning my pirate game, but it wasn’t all in one place previously.) So trade tends to flow in these routes, which has transport implications, pirate implications, and so on. The main drawback here is they don’t really get into what kinds of things are traded. “Goods! You know… Goods from Casmaron!” Cool story bro.
It’s followed by a 2 page spread on trade goods but again we’re back to generic anime fantasy content not Golarion content. Did you know people might trade in metals, fish, wine, leather, cloth? Who exactly? Eh, who cares. This is 2 full pages of “No shit Sherlock” with extensive spending of the art budget on 20 illustrations of “A pile of bricks. A pile of lumber. An ingot of gold.” I pray they reused these off some item deck somewhere or something.
Cuisine
There’s some gems in here but a lot of it is that generic fantasy-ish content again. “People like to eat pork! And stew!” There’s blah fantasy bits (behir caviar is tasty) but also some actual Golarion content in places, but I think it sometimes is harmed by a common problem. Technically Golarion is the entire world, then Avistan and Garund the two most prominent continents in products, and then “the Inner Sea” is technically the Mediterranean that’s between the two. So “One unique aspect of Inner Sea cooking is the prevalence of olive oil.” Fair enough. But because all the world products are called “Inner Sea,” and cover places obviously not in the Inner Sea (Fantasy Norway! Fantasy Kenya!), it’s not clear where they’re saying that’s narrowly vs tightly scoped and it harms diversity. “The northern shore of the Inner Sea uses olive oil in its cooking, while the southern shore predominantly uses palm oils” would add some diversity and some clarity as to range in the same space.
Same deal with spices, you get an actual useful bit about pepper from Varisia’s Mushfens being popular, but then just a laundry list of other spices that I guess are everywhere because we have Fantasy Kroger’s. “Basil, dill, rosemary, coriander,…” makes it sound like everyone in the world of Golarion has easy access to the store brand of all 20 common spices.
A bit on drinks, a 2 page graphical layout of “A Noble’s Feast” (no location) is again discount bookstore fare. Just even make it an example Taldan noble’s feast or something; the world of Golarion basically has “all real world areas and cultures” represented.
Then we have 2 recipes which are just excuses to stick recipes in a book because people like that nowadays and 4 cocktail recipes. They have a lot of ice in Northern Garund (think Morocco) do they? I wish they didn’t do the full recipes but just gave some rundowns.
Some of the most useful content I’ve pulled from other sources is like in Cities of Golarion that covered Ilizmagorti, it said it’s a bit of a foodie town and pub crawls are big and here’s a list of representative cocktails. My PCs still say Ilizmagorti was “the best place to party” in my long term pirate campaign mainly because I used this. Notice the conciseness and richness of detail. This entire sidebar takes the space they used for one cocktail recipe in the Travel Guide. “That drink that was just the squeezin’s!” still gets mentioned time to time years later.
Fashion
I mean… So maybe I misunderstand the point of this book. Maybe it’s for 12 year olds who have never done any basic learning about the world or history, and it’s very helpful for them to understand “Silk is an animal fiber like wool.” But it’s billed as a Golarion travel guide God damn it!!! “You can have a beautician do your nails.” The first page is annoying but the second is actually good, it’s fashion trends from Queen Anastasia of Irrisen and Queen Edasseril of Kyonin – sure, Queen fashion trends will travel, that makes sense, it gives me some actual details to put into a real game. “As you look around the high end salon, you see many of the women have real or tailored flowers and leaves adorning the ends of their sleeves and the lower parts of their skirts.” They ask, and “Oh, it’s all the fashion because the Queen of Kyonin a couple countries over is wearing that.” Bam, world immersion.
They keep it up for a while – garb of a student in the Magaambya (fantasy Africa) vs Ustalav (fantasy Transylvania), some New Thassilon driven fashion, some modern anarchist fashion. But we edge back into generic with Accessories. “Handbags! Aprons!” Some are ok though and add world flavor- “Shoanti Tattoos! Varisian Scarves!” The latter help me, the former – I guess it reminds me some people carry purses?
Art & Architecture
I’m going to spare you belaboring the details of this chapter, it’s a mix of generic claptrap with occassional useful examples of some real artists in Golarion, including at least one, Ailson Kindler, that is actually from Golarion lore and not just net new made up, which is great.
Some architectural styles are covered which is good – and finally a bit that is what you would expect in an actual fricking travel guide, famous structures! Go to Riddleport and see the Cyphergate! Go to Osirion and see the pyramids! Each with an illustration.
Pastimes
This is where the generic claptrap to useful world content ratio starts to get a little better. On the one hand, “people collect flowers and shit to entertain themselves.” On the other, we have log rolling popular on the Sellen, people around Lake Encarthan love whittling little big-eyed stylized animals… That I can use to make PCs feel more like they’re in a distinct location.
And then they have extensive rules for “Golem”, which is basically normal poker except there’s a “best hand” made from the discards that can win, and “Basilisk,” a popular sport (though again, popular *where*??? Across Fantasy Tunisia to Fantasy Colombia to Fantasy France? Come on man.).
It ends with a sample Basilisk team, the Riddleport Rollers. OK great! My campaign started in Riddleport! Here’s the goaltender, Mujaika the Wall, who looks like a Mualijae elven woman. Perfect! Ok that’s real PC-interactable world content. Meet them on a ship going to <nearby place>. Party with them. Get pulled into a skirmish game on a beach somewhere, learn the game. That’s a whole game session driven off world content. More please.
Crime & Law
Generic. “Wherever you are… Robbery gets you 20 lashes and 1 to 5 years hard labor.” It makes the content wasted. Call it an example legal code from the Isle of Kortos, have a half page of “well in place X they have wandering judges, in place Y they don’t punish violence much because they victim blame, in place Z conviction is based on a vote from all the citizens that can be bothered to show up in the town square…” and you’re making world content.
Then a two page spread of wanted posters. I “wanted” to like them but they immediately showed the confusion between the “generic objective set of laws” and the practice, since some of the wanted are for doing good acts somewhere that didn’t appreciate them. And no location on most of them.
Now two pages on “headquarters”, with an example furniture shop hiding a thieves’ guild and an Irrisen cop precinct. You really have to squint to see this as Travel Guide material, though I guess you could say the chance a traveller in Irrisen will end up in a lot of cop precinct houses is fair.
What People Know
This is one of the things I have specific expectations around. Too often fantasy worlds are portrayed as people know everything in the setting book. What happened 5000 years ago? Of course a random bog farmer knows about it. Luckily I found this section strong. People have different creation myths, their knowledge of history is generally that “well Aroden started the age of man like, a long time ago, and he died recently and things suck.” What’s the Shining Crusade? “I don’t know but I heard of it.” Realistic, I like it. Introduces the concept of “microregions” where knowledge tends to locally pool – three countries fighting each other have a general shared knowledge, but one country over they may not know much about them. In the Mwangi Expanse, most people know about the Magaambya and welcome traveling scholars from there, and know to be wary of Nagisa and Usaro. This is good info to help show things from ‘the locals’ perspective’ without the locals knowing everything because, you know, they’re primitive savages mostly.
Magic
While this should have more local flavor incorporated besides the obvious “Rahadoum doesn’t allow divine magic,” it’s a good look into what the common man understands. They know magic exists though may not have experienced it; wizards are probably upper class; priests are a little more special because, you know, gods… It also says that many people have some kind of inherent magical knack that they have never trained to the level of “spells” but maybe some of the random superstitious crap they do actually has some effect (folk magic). Good.
Then we have a REAL weird section. I don’t know why it’s in this book and it seems like a pretty major thing to introduce. It turns out whenever you cast a spell you have a bunch of CGI runes that appear around the caster with some specific meanings to them and their colors and fonts and stuff. I mean, this is how it kinda worked in the Pathfinder comics, but this is a strange place to make a canon introduction of what spellcasting looks like in Pathfinder. It definitely means casting every single spell is super obvious, which is a problem for the more stealth casters and enchantments, illusions, and so forth, but eh. Anyway, I don’t know why it’s in this book.
Same deal with a two page spread on spellcaster lairs. This is a travel book man.
Folklore & Mythology
This is cool. Creation myths and differences from place to place. Some example fables and fairy tales. Some ghost stories, some legendary figures. A little more formal than a travel guide would bear but still, good Golarion world content. A bunch of local superstitions, this is totally what I wanted out of this book. In place X a given color or animal or number is lucky/unlucky for a random reason so the locals do something colorful time to time.
Then a full two page tale of a Garundi hero. Nice, though pushing the page count to usability in game ratio.
Religion
More good stuff. Common religious practices, specific things to note per region, religious events & observances, religious iconography. “Gozreh’s worshippers among the Ulfen see the deity’s duality as fire and ice, rather than the wind and the waves… [they] carry iron ice picks…” This is “good” worldbuilding.
Then we have a section with some pantheons. This is “bad” worldbuilding and let me explain why. The concept of a pantheon is great. Normal people don’t pick one god in this kind of polytheistic world, they generally have a set that makes sense in their area and life. Out in farm country in Andoren that’s more like the US Midwest, most folks worship the “Hearth and Harvest” pantheon of X, Y, and Z. That’s cool. These specific ones, however, fall into the min-maxers’ trap of putting together anything from any source with no in-game reason. These pantheons are not local but are often “across the Inner Sea,” and have deities from all kinds of places – Mazludeh, the ruling angel of Holomog, which basically no one has been to and whose worshipers are just described as “Holomog” – suddenly part of a pantheon for people 1000 miles away to use because their “domain” fits into an arbitrary list. Asian gods? European gods? African gods? Native American gods? Nonhuman gods? Sure, mix ’em all together with no justification.
I will never use any of these. And it’s a missed opportunity. Make them hyperlocal and have deities that make fricking sense in them. It’s OK if one is foreign if there’s a reason! I could buy an Asian (Tien) god in a Viking (Ulfen) pantheon because the trade route to fantasy Asia goes through fantasy Norway and there was a whole Adventure Path about it, so maybe one imported deity filled a spot that was kinda missing with the locals so it’s all Thor Loki Odin and samurai lady, fine. But you can’t just say “I’ll pull all the gods from all the regions that have academics in their list of domains and call that a pantheon.”
Nature & Animals
A section on what wildlife, not just monsters, you’ll find as you travel around, like the bowing deer of Nara!
No, I’m kidding, it’s 2 pages of basic PETA propaganda about coexisting with bears and not polluting and stuff. What the absolute fuck. I mean, I agree with it, I was a Boy Scout, but “stuff I personally agree with” is NOT GOOD GAME CONTENT, something that both Paizo and WotC have completely forgotten.
But then we get a page spread of 10 illustrated flora and 10 illustrated fauna, with actual Golarion locations they live in. This is good.
And then two pages of random new herbalist concoctions. Which would be fine in some random Complete Guide to Herbalists but this is a TRAVEL GUIDE. Not “a herbal concoction you can only find in Hermea,” it’s just generic rules content.
And then 2 pages of pets you can buy, including some actual unique and location-dependent ones. Arcadian opossums tolerate being dressed up in little outfits well so they’re popular pets among the white trash of ancient America. OK that’s great!
Finally a 2 page spread of monster locations with a map – reefclaws are abundant south of the Eye and manticores are endemic to the Mindspin Mountains. This is good content but there should be 10x the amount of it, cut some of the flavor text and you could have instad of 6 small blobs on a big world map, more coverage to where whereever your campaign is set, there’s a place renowned for a given kind of monster nearby.
Like, I can’t get over that for every 2 pages of useful content I’m paying for 2 additional pages of dross, and at this hardback cost that’s a buck per three pages.
Weather & Climate
Some good information on the climate in many microregions, with a big but very hard to read map of climactic areas (the legend is miniature and relies on some pretty complicated patterns not just colors). Now if this had a random weather table per region, it would be good game content. As it is, it just tells me that in Fantasy North Africa it’s desert like I would expect from having been through the 7th grade. I don’t hate it but I don’t love it.
Then we have a 2-page spread on natural disasters (normal style) and a 4-page spread on weird supernatural specific weather events that if you, like, vibe with you can get some kind of effect. If you stay outside for a day in the Blood Rains of Ustalav you can make a DC 24 check to maybe get a benefit for a week, or if you f that roll up maybe you get tuberculosis. That’s fun specific world content and Travel Guide worthy. “Travel to Droskar’s Crag, and if you’re lucky enough that it’s spewing ash at the time, rumor is you’ll be protected from the cold when you go back home!”
The Stars
This section talks about the moon, the stars, the constellations (Fantasy Zodiac), moon phases… It’s ok almanac content but does “Moon Phases” need to be an entire 2 page spread? This is one of those “completionist” things that can exhaust PCs. If one or two moons a year are important that’s great, if every single full moon of the year has a special name and meaning and stuff, it becomes hard to care and it’s hard to believe most of the populace does either. At most you’re in an inn in a small town and someone’s grandma is nattering on about how this is the “sweet moon” because it’s around when the berries ripen. Thanks, boomer.
Then we have some astrological backgrounds rules because of course you have to have character options even in a travel book because it’s Pathfinder.
Then they have a 4-page glossary and index, which is actually great because they just toss off random names from all across Golarion and I read the book in one hand while I looked up random deities and stuff with an iPad in the other. (I wish I had known the glossary was there before I got to it, lol, though really hitting PathfinderWiki is better.)
Conclusion
I know I griped a lot. I expected a Travel Guide that does what it says on the back cover, and I think that’s a fair fricking expectation. Fodor’s Guide/Lonely Planet Guide to Golarion would be a great book. If they hired someone from Lonely Planet and had them read 100 lbs. of Golarion lore and said “make a travel guide and make up stuff that’s not in the infodump” I’d pay $100 for it and buy copies for my players. This isn’t that book. But it does have some good Golarion content. There’s animals and stories and art and fashion movements to mine to include in actual Pathfinder games set in the world to add versimilitude.
The “bad” content – most of it isn’t bad per se, just in the wrong book or full of padding. Some is weirdly basic (Did you know in really cold climates people wear winter coats? Here’s a picture of a random winter coat that looks suspiciously like the one Bespoke Post tried to sell me today) and some is weirdly in depth wonkiness (The third full moon of the year is…). The only part I said “no this is wrong and bad for Golarion” is the random-deity pantheons.
If it was a $30 softback I would say it’s a clear buy. As a $40 hardback of 124 pages of which maybe 60 will ever see use… That’s tough. If you’re fairly well off, I guess. I don’t regret buying it but I have plenty of disposable income. If I bought this at age 23 during my first job out of school I’d try to return it.
