Tag Archives: ghana

The Reavers on the Seas of Fate keep on goin’! In Season Seven, we investigate Port Shaw on the Razor Coast, from the Frog God Games Razor Coast setting/campaign. (It was started by infamous Pathfinder author Nick Logue, but abandoned and picked up by Frog God, I actually helped proof it and have a credit in the book!)

The Story Thus Far

Our PCs are pirates from the Riddleport area, plying the seas in their ship the Chainbreaker.

• Captain Sindawe is a Bonuwat Mwangi monk. His patron is the voudou wendo Mama Watanna (a fantasy version of RL African goddess Mami Wata). He is lawful and violent.
• Quartermaster “Serpent” (real name: Ref Jorenson) is an Ulfen barbarian/ranger/druid. He has a large serpent pet (Saluthra), a serpentfolk wife (Samaritha), and can turn into a serpent. He is chaotic and violent.
• Master gunner Wogan is a Chelaxian gun-wielding cleric of Gozreh, the god of wind and wave. He guards his chastity carefully and is less violent than the other two, but a hefty dose of rum covers over the differences.

Back in Riddleport, they got embroiled in a plot by an ancient serpentfolk wizard who took over the identity of Elias Tammerhawk, head of the Cyphermages, a group dedicated to unraveling the secrets of the massive arch known as the Cyphergate. He of course tried to use it to loose a shadow army upon Golarion. The PCs thwarted him, though the opening of the gate did cause problems including a tsunami that trashed Riddleport, and various phantom enemies to deal with that can only be harmed by an ultra-rate metal, orichalcum.

Now, with cypherglyphs embedded in their bodies from that event that burn in proximity to phantom foes, they are hunting the serpent man known as Elias Tammerhawk to the ends of the globe to finish him off. They have tracked him to Port Shaw on the coast of the Mwangi Expanse (fantasy-Africa), which is the southernmost outpost of fantasy-European civilization. With, of course, some detours for random acts of piracy, navigating the remains of the sunken continent of Azlant, and a variety of hair-raising encounters as they made their way south of the equator.

Port Shaw in Golarion

Part of the challenge of GMing this is weaving this large setting into the Pathfinder world of Golarion. Here’s how I did it.

First, the map. I’m looking for the Razor Coast to be part of the western Mwangi coast south of the Shackles, Sargava, and Bloodcove – right off the edge of the published maps and south of the Equator!

Right about here in the big empty region on this interactive map of Golarion.

I basically took the map of the Razor Coast and flipped it both north/south and east/west to fit.

In fact, I had to just eyeball it, but now we’re in the age of AI, let’s see what it can do… Here’s what ChatGPT did! OK, not perfect, but pretty good; Gemini and Claude boofed it pretty hard. And I must say that “Freeport Anal” is pretty on point as a place name.

I also decided on a real-world location analog to pull weather, culture, and other elements from.

One of the things that always appealed to me about D&D is that it was a good prompt to do real world research – all of Gygax’s fiddly polearms in AD&D, understanding what medieval life was like (I have copies of Life In A Medieval City and Life In A Medieval Village whose purchase was prompted by D&D; I even took a medieval history course in college to learn more). In my opinion the “made up fantasy lands” people do nowadays are weak, tepid, lacking in the texture and realism of – real world stuff! So I embrace Golarion lands being “fantasy <wherever>” and then it makes me go learn something real.

I declided that the Razor Coast would be equivalent to the Gulf of Guinea, from Ghana in the north to the end of Nigeria, rotated 90 degrees to the right.

Really the part of the coast from Gabon to Angola is a better geographic analog to the Golarion map; I could have used the Fang people as a guide and made Angola more of an analog to Port Shaw, which would also be a solid choice – but I wanted more a “medieval” feel (when Elmina was colonized) than an “early modern” feel (when Libreville was colonized). Ghana’s later colonized by the British and called the Gold Coast in this later period. And Sargava to the north, when it throws off its chains, will be kinda like the Mali Empire.

I used the RL Ghanian city of Elmina as the Port Shaw reference point, it was colonized by the Portugese in 1482. Tell me this Port Shaw art and this Elmina art don’t look the same!!!

Here’s a concrete example of how having real world places to draw from pays off… So there’s some whaling ships in Port Shaw in the Razor Coast book. That seems like a less tropical and more arctic thing, I wasn’t sure what to do with it – change it, but to what… Insert research… Oh look a whole fucking Wikipedia article on “Whales in Ghanian Waters.” Turns out “Ghana’s coast forms part of the distribution range of a ‘Gulf of Guinea’ humpback whale breeding stock with estimated population at over 10,000 individuals.” Sperm whales wash up from time to time. Well consider me educated and I have enough info now to add realistic details when the PCs engage with it.

Converting the people groups over was easy, the colonists are Chelaxians like in Sargava, the natives are Mwangi, and the local Tulita tribe is just a specific tribe of Bonuwat.

Converting the religions was also easy. The only real church mentioned is the church of Quell which is a sea god, so that maps directly to Gozreh, who’s the deity of all the party as well so they’ll have affinity with those plot threads – there’s a plot to blow up the church of Quell/Gozreh, and Bethany Razor’s ship, the Quell’s Whore, becomes the Gozreh’s Whore.

What about when they start poking deeper into the natives’ beliefs? Real world research to the rescue again – I used these Wikipedia entries as starting points, West African Vodun and Yoruba Religion. We often get a bit of a “New Orleans” view of voodoo from films and stuff. I went more to the original Orisha for details and insipration.

Frank Mentzer’s add-on Razor Coast adventure has voodoo loa based on the same sources (Oggun is even in there by name). In the adventure, PCs go find mystical trinkets for Aizan, the loa of water and the seas (Yemaya, in the Yoruba religion). Sindawe is already hooked up with her under the name Mama Watanna, so we have PC linkage! (OK so technically Mami Wata and Yemaya are different in RL African mythology, but it’s better for my game to combo them… And Mami Wata has a relation to serpents which plays into our party and themes… And again, I have learned something about the real world while figuring this out!)

I mean, I can’t say the tie-ins were all completely accidental as I had a good knowledge of Razor Coast and knew it was the capstone of the campaign from the beginning, but with just a little stage-setting the incorporation of this monster (546 pages in Razor Coast, plus more in Heart of the Razor) into Golarion, and fleshing it out with real world details, was pretty seamless.

Now on to adventures in Port Shaw!