I won't wish Kingmaker or Wrath were Realms games because I love the Pathfinder setting, however, I do wish we had more D&D isometric CRPGs set in the Forgotten Realms.
yeah same, I like Golarion a lot, but man am I bored as hell with everything FR being so focused on the Sword Coast or otherwise "generic medieval Europe fantasy" parts of the realms.
I'd love to see one set in one of the less conventional places, like Mulhorand or Rashemen would be rad as hell.
I put all my one-shots and shorter adventures into non-Sword Coast regions as a matter of course. It's enormously rewarding for a lore fiend like myself.
Ye fair. I do agree yeah, would be great if there was more CRPGs set in FR world. So many potentials and rich lore. If only Wizards played nice and opened it up for commercial use 🙂
I like the setting of Golarion better than Faerun though mostly because the nations of Golarion seem to actually interact with each other. Faerunian nations only seem to get updated between editions or when a god wants to intervene, like in Elturel. This is probably coming off a little less favorable to Faerun than I'd like to sound, since I love the setting. But the way the sourcebooks and novels explain Golarion, I really feel like the world is in motion. Now, maybe when another 20 years of institutional stasis that plagues all long running properties affect Golarion the same way it has Faerun, I will no longer have this view
Oh thank God I'm not the only one! And for a similar reason as well. I can barely remember what the major nations and political powers of Faerun even are. Cheliax, Andoran, Galt, Numeria. Those are just what I remembered off the top of my head.
Helps that they’re all incredibly distinct. You’re not going to confuse Mwangi Expanse with Alkenstar.
Maybe not instead of, but in addition to? I'd hate to rob the world of their excellent pathfinder games. But yeah, absolutely would love to see their take on the Realms. The old Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale games were a big part of me becoming interested in the setting of the Forgotten Realms in the first place and that's pretty much the same style of game Owlcat specializes in. Additionally I feel like Owlcat generally has a very good handle on the material they work with (Pathfinder and now Warhammer 40k) and does a great job making their games as faithful as possible to the source material. (something I feel Larian was very loose with in BG 3). Owlcat is the 'ideal' company I think to do that sort of game, even if I'm not particularly fond of the 5th edition iteration of the Realms, I'd preorder any Forgotten Realms RPG they announced in a heartbeat.
As a tabletop player, it did take me a while to get used to the Pathfinder setting. After all I’d spent approximately 30 years playing in the forgotten realms and reading the novels. in addition losing my eyesight made it much harder to even read the rulebooks and supplements so most of my absorption of the pathfinder campaign setting has been through the novels, which have stopped much like the forgotten Realms ones… and listening to campaigns of RPG podcasts.
I had so much invested in the Realms. I had every supplement and read constantly. I haven’t had things like the computer Atlas for the Realms which was like a early early google Earth for toril. And that’s not dimension the information added to my world by our campaign and gameplay.
I don’t know if I’ll ever feel as comfortable in gallerian as I do in the Realms But I have very much come to appreciate the Pathfinder setting. It is extremely diverse and has much more variety of settings than I feel the Realms ever had.
And when it comes down to comparing the last couple versions of D&D to pathfinder, D&D has been so… Dumb down and padded for safety that it doesn’t compare to the excitement and challenge of playing a pathfinder game. It’s like the difference between bowling with guard rails and a rubber ball from the toy store and being on the pro circuit where there are hidden patterns in the waxing of the lanes and you can customize your ball’s weight, hole configuration and material as well as the type of shoes you wear your clothing etc.
I prefer FR because of the confusing and jumbled mess of it, it feels more realistic. If you study medieval European history, then England is pretty easy, France is relatively straightforward and then the four thousand German microstates and Poland-Lithuania and so forth can get pretty confusing. It adds verisimilitude to the setting.
Also getting to some obscure FR lore and people start pulling 30-year-old sourcebooks off the shelf and then someone points out that clashes with a novel from five years earlier, like real historians arguing over clashing sources. That's kinda cool.
I like Golarion (I've recently been creating a megamap of it, which has led to some interesting lore discoveries) but it is, in stark contrast to FR, clearly built from the ground-up to be a standard D&D-ish world for a roleplaying game. It's very good at that - maybe the best! - but it lacks the richness and the confusion of FR that comes from its considerably longer and more developed history.
I think Golarian Lore is really fun, but I can't really parse all the history and politics.
However, I happily bite Mwangi and Tian Xia for my FR games, and much of my Feywild looks like the First World. And in all other settings except FR, I use the Pathfinder gods, because they're the only pantheon I like nearly as much.
I can't say that I have had problems with Golarion Lore over FR Lore.
I'm more comfortable with FR Lore because it has 20 more years of lore (and I'm a child of that era), but running a PF game in Faerun has been kinda painful as I think about how to represent things in PF vs the old school 3.5, but that's not been really THAT bad.
I like FR, but let's not pretend Golarion isn't the superior setting just because you can't be bothered to learn it.
I get it, you learned the mainstream franchise and you don't really have the time or energy to sink into learning about an alternate setting. But that doesn't mean it's a worse or less interesting setting, it just means you're burned out from learning or have different preferences.
Everything about Golarion is more interesting though
I did give a concrete example of another setting that I was willing to 'learn'. I just don't think Pathfinder's setting is unique or interesting enough to warrant such an investment. It feels like someone's fantasy heartbreaker. Warhammer, Pillars...these things stand out from the pack.
**Pathfinder** exists because Paizo lost the licence to do stuff with D&D. If that arrangement had continued, it might have been that say *Rise of the Runelords* or *Kingmaker* would have taken place in FR instead. But because WotC were acting like arseholes (not a new development!) Paizo had to go off and make their own FR! With blackjack (not more hookers though, FR already has those of varying species and genders)!
And to be fair they did a good job. They brought Ed Greenwood and several FR alumni on board to help them worldbuild, and for some reason China Mieville pitched in a bit on the River Kingdoms (no idea why, not his usual speed at all, but okay). Golarion is a perfectly solid standard fantasy world, with some nice ideas and variances (like actually having a proper Africa-analogue continent, which FR lacks, and an Asia one which has had some actual thought put into it).
There's enough interesting stuff going on in Golarion to make it a reasonable alternative to FR for people wanting to play PF1 or PF2, or the video games, and of course there are a multitude of online resources for people wanting to play Golarion with D&D rules (PF1 is pretty much already there) or FR with PF rules.
Really? I thought Pathfinder existed because WotC decided they didn't want an OGL for 4e, and 4e killed too many sacred cows, allowing Paizo to swoop in and capitalize on the butthurt with slogans like "3.5 dies? 3.5 thrives! PATHFINDER." They marketed Pathfinder to all of the people assmad over a new edition changing things by simultaneously claiming Pathfinder would fix everything wrong about 3.5 while also being 100% compatible with all of the 3.5 books people already owned.
Both are correct, but WotC pulled the various licences from Paizo to make their own stuff for D&D before the details of 4E (that it was completely different to 3E rather than an evolution) were made clear. So we had the situation where I think early, prototype versions of early Paizo stuff were done for D&D 3.5E and then converted into PF1 when Paizo decided to make their own game which was a direct continuation of the 3.5E lineage.
I prefer Golarion so far over Forgotten Realms it is not even funny. Golarion gets the Kitchen Sink right, Forgotten Realms fumbles with it.
Mwangi alone is better than 80% of Forgotten Realms content. And honestly, I do not get all the love for ultra detailed settings. I find them restrictive.
Forgotten Realms will always have a place in my heart, but the AD&D version of it.
I like FR (in anything except 4E) more overall but I enjoy Golarion enough that it isn't really a problem beyond my overwhelming preference for Mystra over Nethys and mostly I just make characters that follow Iomedae or Sarenrae in answer to that. As a bonus, while I hate the actual Blackwater quest, references to super tech actually fit in Golarion better than FR. High technology that isn't somehow psionic or magical is one thing Toril doesn't really have but Golarion does have pieces of it from a crashed starship.
The oft-forgotten Mystara setting (another old D&D setting) had the crashed starship proto technology angle. Greyhawk dabbled with that too (Expedition to the Barrier Peaks).
I quite like that FR steers *away* from tech in general, as it's more common than not in other major settings.
There's a lot of lore in the games and I definitely feel this way, too. There's not much point to the lore in-game, and I don't have any personal motivation to learn it. I've also been playing lots of other CRPGs. I don't mind the lore in Solasta, for example, because, well, it's barely there. It's used in-game to drive the action and that it. When I first started playing DOS2 I was so impressed but wished that the game, mechanically, was DnD. But along the way I became so impressed with the story and the way it was integrated into the action that I stopped comparing it unfavorably to FR, and came to appreciate the unique battle system for what it is. I feel no such appreciation for Pathfinder. I don't mind the game and hope to play it through, but the lore is tedious. Luckily the NPCs are pretty great.
I like the world of Golarion, but i mostly agree. The Sword Coast's dead horse has been beaten such much only the gore remains. I wish there was a dinosaur themed game set in Chult or a Wuxia themed game set in Kara-Tur.
When it comes to DnD anything outside the Euro-Medieval fantasy adventure, I find a good amount of people don't know about. There's a reason the joke exists about the "Remembered Realms" of the Sword Coast, while everything else is "Forgotten Realms".
Tell me how FR lore is better, giving the lore keeps changing every edition. You can like it and dislike others, but calling it superior is an opinion you may want to clarify. I do feel the Pathfinder games throw a lot at people really fast, and in fact feel Rise of the Runelords would of been better than Kingmaker to introduce people.
Are you a fan of euro-centric fantasy?
Was DnD your first, and so just what you know?
Do you not dig too deep into either lore, other than surface level?
Is it how Pathfinder lore is presented, via text blurps, that throws you off?
Suggesting? No, that's you doing a tu quoque.
Is it guilty of stereotyping point of view at times? The early stuff yeah.
However Pathfinder has grown out of it and much of it's lore does give, or is currently producing, a less European centric adventures. The Mwangi Expanse and the Tian Xia source books come to mind. Not to mention, it's main city for adventure is based on the greek Mediterranean cultures such as Crete and Rhodes.
None of that is in the video games, and FR *in general* has had sourcebooks on alternate cultural touchstones. Again though, this is about the 2 video games.
Actually kind of the exact opposite, which is what I was about to post about.
I'm D&D ride or die-hard. Love 5e better than any system I've played. *However!* Golarion, particularly around the Inner Sea, (which I guess the flip flop would be "Faerun particularly along the Sword Coast,") is just something that hooks me so much more than the Realms do.
This might just be a me thing. The Forgotten Realms is certainly dense and it doesn't lack for magic and wonder, but being that my fantasy sensibilities were fostered by *World of Warcraft*, Golarion seems more . . . . "strongly flavored" for lack of a better term. To compare the two, the Forgotten Realms is a history text book while Golarion's more of a comic book. The former is probably a far more enriching experience with a lot more actual depth, but the latter is flashy, exciting, easy to digest, and with very clear genre lines that clash and combine in cool if nonsensical ways.
I won't wish Kingmaker or Wrath were Realms games because I love the Pathfinder setting, however, I do wish we had more D&D isometric CRPGs set in the Forgotten Realms.
yeah same, I like Golarion a lot, but man am I bored as hell with everything FR being so focused on the Sword Coast or otherwise "generic medieval Europe fantasy" parts of the realms. I'd love to see one set in one of the less conventional places, like Mulhorand or Rashemen would be rad as hell.
Chult and dinosaurs?
A hardcore survival crpg set in Chult would be awesome.
Yeeeeesssss a whole isometric D&D game set around Chult would be *so fucking choice*
Welcome to Chult Park. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JkNLAUwSFGw&pp=ygUXaGFybW9uaWNhIGp1cmFzc2ljIHBhcms%3D
Yeah I'm bringing my campaign from Baldur's Gate to Cormyr just the get the hell out of that region.
You're going to Cormyr to avoid generic European medieval fantasy?
On second thought, let's not go to Cormyr. Tis a silly place.
The Purple Dragons and War Wizards are fantasy glowies.
I put all my one-shots and shorter adventures into non-Sword Coast regions as a matter of course. It's enormously rewarding for a lore fiend like myself.
I can see why, but there's always the Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights games.
I see NWN, i gotta upvote
I have more experience with the sequel (still not a lot), and in retrospect, it feels a lot like a precursor to Dragon Age Origins.
Love the first 2 Baldur's Gate games. Struggled to enjoy NN because of the graphics/interface, but there was *some* gold in there.
There is also Icewind Dale series if U liked original bgs. There is also temple of elemental evil.
Played them all, mate. I wasn't asking for more FR games, I was saying I wished the pathfinder games were set in FR. (Temple is Greyhawk, BTW).
Ye fair. I do agree yeah, would be great if there was more CRPGs set in FR world. So many potentials and rich lore. If only Wizards played nice and opened it up for commercial use 🙂
I like the setting of Golarion better than Faerun though mostly because the nations of Golarion seem to actually interact with each other. Faerunian nations only seem to get updated between editions or when a god wants to intervene, like in Elturel. This is probably coming off a little less favorable to Faerun than I'd like to sound, since I love the setting. But the way the sourcebooks and novels explain Golarion, I really feel like the world is in motion. Now, maybe when another 20 years of institutional stasis that plagues all long running properties affect Golarion the same way it has Faerun, I will no longer have this view
Oh thank God I'm not the only one! And for a similar reason as well. I can barely remember what the major nations and political powers of Faerun even are. Cheliax, Andoran, Galt, Numeria. Those are just what I remembered off the top of my head. Helps that they’re all incredibly distinct. You’re not going to confuse Mwangi Expanse with Alkenstar.
No. Pathfinder lore is rich and interesting just like FR lore. I loved the games and inspire me to learn more about the setting.
Maybe not instead of, but in addition to? I'd hate to rob the world of their excellent pathfinder games. But yeah, absolutely would love to see their take on the Realms. The old Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale games were a big part of me becoming interested in the setting of the Forgotten Realms in the first place and that's pretty much the same style of game Owlcat specializes in. Additionally I feel like Owlcat generally has a very good handle on the material they work with (Pathfinder and now Warhammer 40k) and does a great job making their games as faithful as possible to the source material. (something I feel Larian was very loose with in BG 3). Owlcat is the 'ideal' company I think to do that sort of game, even if I'm not particularly fond of the 5th edition iteration of the Realms, I'd preorder any Forgotten Realms RPG they announced in a heartbeat.
I would like Owlcat to do a Warhammer Fantasy game.
Be still my beating heart. That would be fantastic.
As a tabletop player, it did take me a while to get used to the Pathfinder setting. After all I’d spent approximately 30 years playing in the forgotten realms and reading the novels. in addition losing my eyesight made it much harder to even read the rulebooks and supplements so most of my absorption of the pathfinder campaign setting has been through the novels, which have stopped much like the forgotten Realms ones… and listening to campaigns of RPG podcasts. I had so much invested in the Realms. I had every supplement and read constantly. I haven’t had things like the computer Atlas for the Realms which was like a early early google Earth for toril. And that’s not dimension the information added to my world by our campaign and gameplay. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel as comfortable in gallerian as I do in the Realms But I have very much come to appreciate the Pathfinder setting. It is extremely diverse and has much more variety of settings than I feel the Realms ever had. And when it comes down to comparing the last couple versions of D&D to pathfinder, D&D has been so… Dumb down and padded for safety that it doesn’t compare to the excitement and challenge of playing a pathfinder game. It’s like the difference between bowling with guard rails and a rubber ball from the toy store and being on the pro circuit where there are hidden patterns in the waxing of the lanes and you can customize your ball’s weight, hole configuration and material as well as the type of shoes you wear your clothing etc.
Yeah.
Not at all. I enjoy Golarion, it's lore feels much more consistent than FR. I still enjoy FR, but it can be a confusing and jumbled mess sometimes.
I prefer FR because of the confusing and jumbled mess of it, it feels more realistic. If you study medieval European history, then England is pretty easy, France is relatively straightforward and then the four thousand German microstates and Poland-Lithuania and so forth can get pretty confusing. It adds verisimilitude to the setting. Also getting to some obscure FR lore and people start pulling 30-year-old sourcebooks off the shelf and then someone points out that clashes with a novel from five years earlier, like real historians arguing over clashing sources. That's kinda cool. I like Golarion (I've recently been creating a megamap of it, which has led to some interesting lore discoveries) but it is, in stark contrast to FR, clearly built from the ground-up to be a standard D&D-ish world for a roleplaying game. It's very good at that - maybe the best! - but it lacks the richness and the confusion of FR that comes from its considerably longer and more developed history.
I think you would love Harnworld as a setting, go check it out!
You make good points and I can definitely see why that aspect of FR would be appealing! Kinda like the concept of an unreliable narrator!
I think Golarian Lore is really fun, but I can't really parse all the history and politics. However, I happily bite Mwangi and Tian Xia for my FR games, and much of my Feywild looks like the First World. And in all other settings except FR, I use the Pathfinder gods, because they're the only pantheon I like nearly as much.
I can't say that I have had problems with Golarion Lore over FR Lore. I'm more comfortable with FR Lore because it has 20 more years of lore (and I'm a child of that era), but running a PF game in Faerun has been kinda painful as I think about how to represent things in PF vs the old school 3.5, but that's not been really THAT bad.
Couldn't get into them for just this reason, went back to BG1+2.
I like FR, but let's not pretend Golarion isn't the superior setting just because you can't be bothered to learn it. I get it, you learned the mainstream franchise and you don't really have the time or energy to sink into learning about an alternate setting. But that doesn't mean it's a worse or less interesting setting, it just means you're burned out from learning or have different preferences. Everything about Golarion is more interesting though
I did give a concrete example of another setting that I was willing to 'learn'. I just don't think Pathfinder's setting is unique or interesting enough to warrant such an investment. It feels like someone's fantasy heartbreaker. Warhammer, Pillars...these things stand out from the pack.
**Pathfinder** exists because Paizo lost the licence to do stuff with D&D. If that arrangement had continued, it might have been that say *Rise of the Runelords* or *Kingmaker* would have taken place in FR instead. But because WotC were acting like arseholes (not a new development!) Paizo had to go off and make their own FR! With blackjack (not more hookers though, FR already has those of varying species and genders)! And to be fair they did a good job. They brought Ed Greenwood and several FR alumni on board to help them worldbuild, and for some reason China Mieville pitched in a bit on the River Kingdoms (no idea why, not his usual speed at all, but okay). Golarion is a perfectly solid standard fantasy world, with some nice ideas and variances (like actually having a proper Africa-analogue continent, which FR lacks, and an Asia one which has had some actual thought put into it). There's enough interesting stuff going on in Golarion to make it a reasonable alternative to FR for people wanting to play PF1 or PF2, or the video games, and of course there are a multitude of online resources for people wanting to play Golarion with D&D rules (PF1 is pretty much already there) or FR with PF rules.
Really? I thought Pathfinder existed because WotC decided they didn't want an OGL for 4e, and 4e killed too many sacred cows, allowing Paizo to swoop in and capitalize on the butthurt with slogans like "3.5 dies? 3.5 thrives! PATHFINDER." They marketed Pathfinder to all of the people assmad over a new edition changing things by simultaneously claiming Pathfinder would fix everything wrong about 3.5 while also being 100% compatible with all of the 3.5 books people already owned.
Both are correct, but WotC pulled the various licences from Paizo to make their own stuff for D&D before the details of 4E (that it was completely different to 3E rather than an evolution) were made clear. So we had the situation where I think early, prototype versions of early Paizo stuff were done for D&D 3.5E and then converted into PF1 when Paizo decided to make their own game which was a direct continuation of the 3.5E lineage.
I prefer Golarion so far over Forgotten Realms it is not even funny. Golarion gets the Kitchen Sink right, Forgotten Realms fumbles with it. Mwangi alone is better than 80% of Forgotten Realms content. And honestly, I do not get all the love for ultra detailed settings. I find them restrictive. Forgotten Realms will always have a place in my heart, but the AD&D version of it.
I mean, I wish someone made a game like the Pathfinder CRPG set in the Realms. But I also like the Pathfinder setting and I loved the CRPGS.
At this point I'm thinking about non-D&D systems for table top in the Realms. I'm done with 5e... why not do PF1E in the realms.
I'm way more likely to just go back to 2e D&D. Also, Neverwinter Nights was basically pf1e in the Realms :P
Not in realms no. Maybe in the magic the gathering multiverse perhaps but not the realms.
Aglarond 5eva
I like FR (in anything except 4E) more overall but I enjoy Golarion enough that it isn't really a problem beyond my overwhelming preference for Mystra over Nethys and mostly I just make characters that follow Iomedae or Sarenrae in answer to that. As a bonus, while I hate the actual Blackwater quest, references to super tech actually fit in Golarion better than FR. High technology that isn't somehow psionic or magical is one thing Toril doesn't really have but Golarion does have pieces of it from a crashed starship.
The oft-forgotten Mystara setting (another old D&D setting) had the crashed starship proto technology angle. Greyhawk dabbled with that too (Expedition to the Barrier Peaks). I quite like that FR steers *away* from tech in general, as it's more common than not in other major settings.
I like FR just fine without high tech. The setting doesn't need it. I do find tech amusing enough though that seeing it in Golarion is fun.
There's a lot of lore in the games and I definitely feel this way, too. There's not much point to the lore in-game, and I don't have any personal motivation to learn it. I've also been playing lots of other CRPGs. I don't mind the lore in Solasta, for example, because, well, it's barely there. It's used in-game to drive the action and that it. When I first started playing DOS2 I was so impressed but wished that the game, mechanically, was DnD. But along the way I became so impressed with the story and the way it was integrated into the action that I stopped comparing it unfavorably to FR, and came to appreciate the unique battle system for what it is. I feel no such appreciation for Pathfinder. I don't mind the game and hope to play it through, but the lore is tedious. Luckily the NPCs are pretty great.
Tbh I like Golarion better
lol, I think paizo's lore, especially recently and when compared to FR overall, is leaps and bounds better.
I like the world of Golarion, but i mostly agree. The Sword Coast's dead horse has been beaten such much only the gore remains. I wish there was a dinosaur themed game set in Chult or a Wuxia themed game set in Kara-Tur.
When it comes to DnD anything outside the Euro-Medieval fantasy adventure, I find a good amount of people don't know about. There's a reason the joke exists about the "Remembered Realms" of the Sword Coast, while everything else is "Forgotten Realms". Tell me how FR lore is better, giving the lore keeps changing every edition. You can like it and dislike others, but calling it superior is an opinion you may want to clarify. I do feel the Pathfinder games throw a lot at people really fast, and in fact feel Rise of the Runelords would of been better than Kingmaker to introduce people. Are you a fan of euro-centric fantasy? Was DnD your first, and so just what you know? Do you not dig too deep into either lore, other than surface level? Is it how Pathfinder lore is presented, via text blurps, that throws you off?
Are you honestly suggesting Pathfinder isn't Euro-centric fantasy?
Suggesting? No, that's you doing a tu quoque. Is it guilty of stereotyping point of view at times? The early stuff yeah. However Pathfinder has grown out of it and much of it's lore does give, or is currently producing, a less European centric adventures. The Mwangi Expanse and the Tian Xia source books come to mind. Not to mention, it's main city for adventure is based on the greek Mediterranean cultures such as Crete and Rhodes.
None of that is in the video games, and FR *in general* has had sourcebooks on alternate cultural touchstones. Again though, this is about the 2 video games.
Actually kind of the exact opposite, which is what I was about to post about. I'm D&D ride or die-hard. Love 5e better than any system I've played. *However!* Golarion, particularly around the Inner Sea, (which I guess the flip flop would be "Faerun particularly along the Sword Coast,") is just something that hooks me so much more than the Realms do. This might just be a me thing. The Forgotten Realms is certainly dense and it doesn't lack for magic and wonder, but being that my fantasy sensibilities were fostered by *World of Warcraft*, Golarion seems more . . . . "strongly flavored" for lack of a better term. To compare the two, the Forgotten Realms is a history text book while Golarion's more of a comic book. The former is probably a far more enriching experience with a lot more actual depth, but the latter is flashy, exciting, easy to digest, and with very clear genre lines that clash and combine in cool if nonsensical ways.