My players characters are currently exploring some truly ancient underground ruins of a sunken city (the setting is Ptolus, if it matters), and the PCs are trying to find the sites of some temples of various gods to explore.

Next up on the list are temples of ancient gods of knowledge and magic, and when I searched for thematically appropriate monsters to populate them, I came across Nothics. They have a pretty good base concept, but I need some more ideas to make exploring a ruin filled with them interesting. Things I am looking for in particular include:

• D&D lore about the Nothics (this doesn't have to be from 5E)
• Ways of personalizing them and their environment, emphasizing how weird and creepy they are
• Variant stat blocks that might make encounters with them more interesting
• Creatures that might co-exist with them

But feel free to throw any ideas you have out here - I am still in an early brainstorming phase!

What are your top three Pathfinder Adventure Paths, from either edition - and why?

As a reminder, here is the full list:

Pathfinder 1E:

• Rise of the Runelords
• Curse of the Crimson Throne
• Second Darkness
• Legacy of Fire
• Council of Thieves
• Kingmaker
• Serpent's Skull
• Carrion Crown
• Jade Regent
• Skull & Shackles
• Shattered Star
• Reign of Winter
• Wrath of the Righteous
• Mummy's Mask
• Iron Gods
• Giantslayer
• Hell's Rebels
• Hell's Vengeance
• Strange Aeons
• Ironfang Invasion
• Ruins of Azlant
• War for the Crown
• Return of the Runelords
• Tyrant's Grasp

Pathfinder 2E:

• Age of Ashes
• Extinction Curse
• Agents of Edgewatch
• Abomination Vaults
• Fists of the Ruby Phoenix
• Strength of Thousands
• Quest for the Frozen Flame
• Outlaws of Alkenstar
• Blood Lords
• Gatewalkers
• Stolen Fate
• Sky King's Tomb
• Season of Ghosts
• Seven Dooms for Sandpoint
• Wardens of Wildwood
• Curtain Call
• Triumph of the Tusk
• Spore War
• Shades of Blood
• Myth-Speaker
• Revenge of the Runelords
• Hellbreakers-

I buy a lot of digital RPG books - the shelf space in my apartment is ultimately limited, while the space on my hard drive is far less constrained (despite current storage prices). Furthermore, while the reading experience is still slightly better for physical books, I have a color e-ink reader which comes close enough for my purposes.

However, I do have a pet peeve with some RPG publishers: They refuse to give the files proper file names. Paizo is the worst offender among them, though not the only one.

I mean, I don't mind if the file name includes the product code. It's fine if a "PZO13008E" somewhere in there.

But please, for all that is unholy, make the file name "PZO13008E Hellfire Dispatches" instead of just leaving it at that! When I am making large purchases of multiple books - which I do frequently - I have to go on a renaming orgy:

1. Open the file
2. Check what product this file represents
3. Close the file
4. Rename the file

If the file name included the actual product title, I could skip steps 1-3.

I translate German folk tales, and here is one that definitely made me wonder about possible connections to the Cthulhu Mythos:

In the year 1454, a curious heresy spread in Thuringia, particularly in the Sangerhausen region as well as the domains of the Schwarzburger Unterherrschaft. According to legend, the men and women who adhered to this heresy secretly came together in cellars and dark chambers where they worshiped the Devil. The Devil appeared in the form of a bumblebee and flew in front of the mouth of each of them. Once the devotions were over, the lights were quenched, and everyone grabbed around them. And when they grabbed someone of the opposite sex, they sinned with them in a brazen manner, even if they were mother, sister, or daughter.(*) A smith revealed this to the lord of the realm, and led him to such a congregation in disguise so that he could witness this outrage for himself. After this, most of these sectarians were apprehended and burned, but many of them went joyfully to their deaths.

While fantasy is a many-varied genre, religion in fantasy RPGs is often some mix-up of polytheism with Christian notions - including of the afterlife. The common assumption seems to be that while there are a multitude of gods, if you dedicate your life and belief in that god in particular you will end up in the specific afterlife of that god.

In Christianity, the situation is of course a bit more complex than that. One major precondition for entering the "good afterlife" (i.e. Heaven) is that you need to get baptized. For a long time, this left a rather awkward question mark for what happens to the souls of infants who died during or soon after birth - before they could receive a baptism. Folklore sometimes comes up with its own answers for that, but this was certainly a thing that people worried about.

RPG fantasy religions tend to deemphasize baptism since it's such an iconic Christian rite - but this only further emphasizes the question of what happens to the souls of children who died before they could actually express faith in a particular deity. Does any particular deity claim these children then? Perhaps a deity worshiped by a parent - and if so, of which parent (are there "afterlife child custody" court cases)?

Of course, a fantasy setting does not need to have an afterlife people believe in. But if there are multiple afterlives maintained by different deities (or at least, if people believe that such afterlives exist), then people will worry about that.

In letzter Zeit gibt es ja diesen Drang von Politikern, Altersbeschränkungen für "Social Media" einzuführen, was dann bedeuten würde, daß man für Social Media-Plattformen seine Identität nachweisen müsste - eine hervorragende Gelegenheit für diese Plattformen, noch mehr Benutzerdaten zu sammeln.

Das Fediverse ist glücklicherweise nicht darauf ausgerichtet, solche Altersnachweise einzuziehen. Aber dennoch macht das die Situation für die Betreiber von Instanzen schwierig, da sie sich dann potentiell strafbar machen.

Jetzt würde mich interessieren: Gibt es in den deutschsprachigen Ländern irgendwelche juristisch klaren Definitionen von "Social Media", mit denen man klar identifizieren könnte, ob eine Fediverse-Anwendung als solche zählt oder nicht?

Z. B. betreibe ich einen WordPress-Blog mit dem ActivityPub-Plugin. Zählt das schon als "Social Media"?

Wer hier kennt sich mit dieser Thematik aus?

So far, my ire at the Merz cabinet has primarily been focused on Katherina Reiche. But then I discovered that Wolfram Weimer is truly horrible, too.

The practice of using fantasy counterpart cultures - cultures and societies that are very similar to real world cultures of specific times and places - has a long history in fantasy in general, and fantasy RPGs in particular.

And, in truth, there are good reasons for that. Fantasy worldbuilding is a major task, and fantasy worldbuilding for RPGs in particular requires that not only the GM understands any given culture, but the players as well - but understanding a culture requires a lot of effort, and there is only so much time everyone at the table has available for that.

Thus, using familiar elements is a great time saver. The main reason we see the same Tolkien ancestries over and over again (elves, dwarves, halflings, orcs...) is that most players of fantasy RPGs are already familiar with their basic concepts, and thus only have to learn what is different from the norm. But you create fantasy ancestries from scratch, you need to convey all that information to the players.

The same applies to fantasy counterpart cultures - if you have a vague familiarity with the real world culture, then familiarizing yourself with a fantasy culture will be a lot easier.

However, there's also a lot that can go wrong with using fantasy counterpart cultures. Misrepresentation is always a danger, especially with marginalized groups and if the developers did not consult with members of that culture. Likewise, if you are building a fantasy counterpart culture of a nation that has some ugly history, then you risk whitewashing that history.

So what are your thoughts? Do you like to have fantasy counterpart cultures in your settings, or do you prefer to avoid them? And what are some good examples of fantasy counterpart cultures done right?

Any long-running published setting is going to have a couple of warts - ones where parts of the audience are going to say: "What the hell were they thinking?"

The same is true for Golarion. For the most part, I love the setting, but there are a number of setting elements I find problematic. One of these is Andoran. The best way I can describe it is as:

"A fantasy counterpart culture of the post-Revolutionary War United States of America - as retconned through American propaganda."

So while the real world American Revolutionary War was allegedly about "Freedom", but at the same time reinforced the system of slavery and exploitation of the First Nations - something commonly glossed over in American history - Andoran simply leaves out these ugly aspects and says that Andoran's revolution was really about fighting for Freedom and Democracy - which they now seek to export to the rest of the world.

I mean, I am not opposed to democracies in fantasy settings, or groups of people fighting slavery. But it's the mixture of these elements with tropes of the nascent USA that really bothers me.

What are your thoughts on this?

I've been working on this wiki and interactive map of translated German-language folk tales since last June, and while there are always more tales to add, the wiki is functionally complete.

Please take a look, and tell me if there's anything that could be improved!

Fantasy RPG settings have almost always drawn inspirations from real world cultures, including real world folklore and mythology. This also includes fantastic creatures, which are a staple of monster manualy since the earliest days of D&D.

And in recent years, there have been more and more efforts to draw TTRPG inspiration from non-European sources - a trend I approve of, since we can always use more diverse sources of inspiration.

However, I am curious how you all use creatures from different cultures in your fantasy campaigns and worldbuilding. I could see a few different approaches:

Do you assume "counterpart fantasy cultures" for your world? I.e. is there a Not!Europe, Not!Asia, Not!Africa, Not!Mesoamerica etc., each of which has "culturally appropriate" supernatural creatures? In such a situation, supernatural creatures would largely stick to their "home region", and occasional "guest stars" in other regions would be noteworthy. This works well, but it does mean you are usually limiting yourself to a "culturally appropriate" subset of the creatures in the books.

Alternately, you could try to integrate these creatures into whatever cultural region your campaign focuses on. In my view, this would require some rewriting in how these creatures are portrayed and/or named - if your region has a culturally English or Germanic slant, then having creatures that are called "Sramana", "Betobeto-san", or "Tzitzimitl" (to pick three examples from the recent Monster Core 2 for Pathfinder) will seem strange.

I feel there is no "right" or "wrong" approach to this, but I am curious how you are tackling this issue.

Another one of my pet peeves about fantasy world building is the concept of "large cities surrounded by miles and miles of howling wilderness" (looking at you, Forgotten Realms!) While such cities aren't completely unknown in real world history ("oasis towns" in particular, they are and were very rare. Most real world cities are surrounded by a network of smaller settlements, and while you can come up with reasons for why a fantasy city is truly isolated, a setting will be more plausible if that is a rare exception.

So, what is a good way of developing settlement patterns in fantasy worlds?

A concept I found useful for worldbuilding purposes is that of the "Central Place Theory", which describes the notion that settlements of different sizes support each other. (And I first came across it in the WFRP 1E rulebook, of all things!) While this theory is not free criticism, I feel that it yields results that are plausible enough. In order to adapt it for fantasy purposes, I propose the following categories:

• Villages are mostly inhabited by farmers and other food producers, although there might be a few specialist trades such as millers and village blacksmith. They are self-sufficient when it comes to food production, but need to trade for more complex tools. Using Central Europe as an example, it rarely takes more than an hour or two to travel to the next village.
• Towns have markets where the farmers can sell their produce, and thus are rarely more than a day's worth of travel away from any given village. They are administrative centers and can produce most of the tools that the rural population needs for daily survival. However, they are also part of a network of long-distance trade, selling surplus from their own region and buying items that are rare in the local area. Each town is supported by a small network of villages, without whom it would starve.
• Finally, Cities are major trade hubs and centers of craftsmanship. They will support multiple specialized trades and might be famous throughout the country (or beyond) for things they produce. Just like each town is supported by a network of villages, each city is supported by a network of towns.

In other words, when you place a city on a map, think about the network of towns and villages that support it. Depending on the scale of the map, you might not bother to place them all - but you should remember that they are there, instead having the wilderness start close to the city walls.

Which brings me to another point - real world history didn't have much in the way of "monster-infested wildernesses", but these are a staple of fantasy world - and they are a further reason why such dense settlement patterns might develop. After all, a lonely settlement is easy pickings for monsters - but a network of settlements can defend each other. If a single village faces monsters that are too tough for the inhabitants, they can ask for help from the next town or even city, who likely have specialist tools (and people) for that kind of thing.

In worlds where dangerous monsters roam the wilds, you could even make the argument that human(oid) civilization is not viable of the network of settlements is too thin - thus, you have "clusters of civilization" huddling together, while the wilds are full of lost settlement that could not be defended any more...

So, what are your thoughts on this? Have you put any consideration into settlement patterns for your own fantasy settings?