Civilization
Pathfinder Gamemastery Guide (Second Edition), page 124
With the major geographical features and terrain of your world decided, you’ll next want to establish significant nations and settlements.
When it comes to designing a world’s cultures, you might want to focus primarily on those areas the party is likely to explore first. This allows you to establish the details and depth of one region’s peoples before expanding out to address others. That’s not to say you shouldn’t have ideas about the cultures beyond your starting settlement—it just means you don’t need to decide every detail of every culture all at once.
As always, you don’t need to demarcate every realm on the globe or indicate every town, hamlet, and thorp. Keep your focus on what you need for your story and your adventure—leaving terra incognita can lead to stories down the road as the party ventures further from home.
In this section
- Societal Benchmarks The following sections can help you establish certain truths about your world as a whole. From there, you can decide the details of specific cultural groups, including whether they deviate from these global standards.
- Designing Nations For any nation you establish in your setting, you’ll want to provide at least a minimal description—the core concept of that nation. The amount of additional detail you provide depends on the needs of your story.
- Building Settlements In Pathfinder, settlements are where characters can rest, recharge, retrain, and dedicate themselves to other downtime activities all in relative peace.