Mecca meets Sigil in the middle of the ocean, with a culture more like Medieval Rome mixed with Venice. Golarion (or at least the parts that matter) in a nutshell. Nations of Golarion Absalom File:PathfinderExplained.jpg But they're sure there was a Golarion at one point. Nobody who was alive for it can remember what happened. As in, it was there, and history and records skip ahead by a couple hundred years, and then it wasn't there. In Starfinder, Paizo settled accounts by making Golarion gone. As if this wasn't enough, the religious hysteria led the two greatest empires of the region to become balkanized devil-worshipping fantasy Nazis and decadent chucklefucks, respectively.Īnyway, if that all sounds like a clusterfuck, don't worry.
To add salt to the wound, this caused a series of events which fucked up the world: the formation of a massive supernatural stationary fuckstorm that annihilated two entire nations and allowed pirates to develop their own kingdoms, the obliteration of a noble barbarian empire by a tear in the tissue of reality opened directly into the Abyss, and the prophets and diviners committing mass suicide as an prophesied golden age for mankind suddenly faded into nothing. Unlike most other fantasy settings, many of the cultures and civilizations of the Inner Sea region are in severe decline after the only deity which represents humans in the Great Beyond, Aroden, died a few centuries ago. The centerpiece of Golarion is the Inner Sea region, consisting of the fantasy equivalents of Western Europe, the Mediterranean Sea zone, and the northern half of Africa. Even its blatancy is not unique Mystara did it first, and with its bizarre races and fantastical tweaks on real-world cultures, Golarion resembles a Mystara written in and for the 2010s more than anything.
What makes Golarion stand out compared to Greyhawk or the Realms is that the latter settings tend to obscure their real-world inheritances more by keeping the "non-Medieval Europe" cultures pushed from the highlight the Realms in particular generally keeps its more blatantly real-world homage based portions off of the core map and out of the spotlight, such as Al-Qadim, Kara-tur and Maztica. ALL of the "iconic trinity" of settings from the earliest days of D&D - Mystara, Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms - have a similar motif. It bears mentioning that this "fantasy kitchen sink" style actually isn't new to D&D. One notable exception is the elder gods of the Far Realm, which Paizo replaced by biting the bullet and licensing the Cthulhu Mythos from Chaosium. This is a transparent attempt to fill the gaping orifice left behind by the loss of the D&D's "Product Identity" as cheaply as possible, justified as a way of allowing many different campaign styles to coexist in the same setting.
Golarion is notable for ripping off fucking everything, including dime-store pulp novels, random bits of relatively modern history, earlier editions of D&D, sci-fi kitsch, and the kitchen sink.
When Wizards announced Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition and neglected to mention that the OGL would be replaced with a giant spiky dildo, Paizo cashed in on the confusion and announced that they would be creating a replacement RPG, based on OGL content but with a less restrictive license for its "Product Identity" and with Golarion as the default setting. Two months later at Gen Con 2007, Paizo published Rise of the Runelords, the first of Pathfinder's famous Adventure Paths and the first product to bear the Pathfinder brand name this was followed by another adventure path and a couple "Pathfinder Chronicles" supplements. Golarion was first introduced to players as a generic OGL module named Crown of the Kobold King, released in June of 2007 under Paizo's GameMastery imprint. It's not the sum total of the setting's Material Plane like, say, Athas is, but it's where most of the action is and where you're going to be spending most of your time so it's also the nickname for what's properly known as the Pathfinder Campaign Setting. Golarion is the "main" planet in Paizo's default campaign setting for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game that, as of Pathfinder's second edition, is named Age of Lost Omens.