Pathfinder Chronicles (1/?)

(This is part of a series of posts reviewing the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting.)

Chapter 1 of the PCCS is devoted to the usual: races and classes. Moreover, since the races and classes in question are exactly those found in the SRD, there are almost no rules in this chapter. (In fact, all the rules in the book could fit on about three sheets of notebook paper, so while the book is OGLed, very little of it is OGC. But I digress.)

While the history of the world of Golarion is covered in more detail later, it's clear that humans dominate the setting: there are two pages describing each nonhuman race, then two pages describing each human nationality. The nonhumans are mostly unsurprising: the dwarves mine and craft, while the elves are mildly otherworldly and mostly live in the woods, and both have fallen from their respective once-heights; the halflings stand in humans' shadows; the half-orcs and half-elves have the same torn-between-two-heritages stories most 3.5 settings have associated with them.

As for the gnomes, though, Paizo has taken their cliché happy-go-lucky and cavalier outlook and behavior and calmly cranked it up past 'eleven' and well into 'mad'. And then broken off the knob. Players of Changeling: The Dreaming will perhaps see echoes thereof.

The human nationalities are almost all Expys of various real-world groups: Arabs, Celts, Indian, Norse, Romany — the Mwangi and Tian are explicitly collections of nationalities improperly lumped together by the more European groups: the former corresponding to the various African and Australian aboriginal tribes, and the latter to various East Asian cultures. (What, no Native Americans?)

The millennia-sunken city of Azlant corresponds to Atlantis (with bits of R'lyeh), though perhaps more accurately to Rome: many humans and human nations claim Azlanti genetic or cultural descent (with varying accuracy and veracity). The Taldane are decidedly English, but not of any particular era — they're a curious mix of Victorian-era and postcolonial England. Only they, the Chelaxians, and the Garundi do not directly map onto a real-world Terran culture, or at least not one that comes to mind.

There's a very clear reason implied for this: those three are the major cultures at the focus of the campaign setting. GMs can thus bring in exotic NPCs from exotic lands without having to have those exotica detailed in an actual Pathfinder sourcebook — Wikipedia will suffice.

The class descriptions are short, containing almost nothing surprising to a veteran of D&D 3.x; since the rules are in the SRD, they're not included here — there's only a page of flavor text each for the unlikely, but not entirely impossible, case that someone has purchased the book without knowing what rôle a ‘rogue’ typically fills in society and adventure. However, each class description is accompanied by an optional tweak — a class-ability substitution, typically limited to certain origin-locales.

An extra-special note: under the Tian-Shu male names, amongst several other perfectly normal Chinese names transliterated in the ubiquitous tone-stripped hanyu pinyin, the impossible name "Syaoran" is given. There is only one feasible source for this error, and it is corroborated by the presence of the name "Meilin" in the female names. Oh, hi, I see what you did there. Errata: strike "Syaoran" and replace with "Xiaolang".

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Edit 2009-03-18: trimmed.