Pathfinder 2E "Everything I've Said So Far About the God Who Will Die" - Creative Director Luis Loza on Setting Shake-Ups Coming to PF2E in "War of Immortals".

Justice and Rule said:

I don't think they are all concurrent, but they all did happen. They all result in a victory for good (or evil, in the case of those evil party APs).

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payn said:

Sure, but its not like changes in one effect the other every 3-6 months. They are not reprinting setting material continuously to account for changes in every single AP. There were no real canon changes until PF2 as far as I recall.

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payn said:

I was under the impression the APs, at least in PF1 era, all happened concurrently? So, it wasn't like the results of Carrion Crown would effect the results of Kingmaker etc... I sort of lost track in the change over to PF2 which of all those stories became canon forward into PF2 era.

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Staffan said:

No, with some exceptions they are all happening sequentially. Golarion's timeline moves at a 1:1 ratio to ours. The Lost Omens World Guide has a time line with the events of Rise of the Runelords in 4707, Curse of the Crimson Throne in 4708, Second Darkness happening in 4709, Serpent's Skull in 4710, Shattered Star in 4712, Reign of Winter and Wrath of the Righteous in 4713, Mummy's Mask in 4714, Hell's Rebels in 4715, Iron Gods in 4716, Ironfang Invasion in 4717, War for the Throne and Return of the Runelords in 4718, and Tyrant's Grasp in 4719. However, in most cases they're rather separated by distance, so the stuff going on in Varisia in 4707 and 4708 isn't going to have much effect on the stuff going on in the Mwangi Expanse in 4710, and the Queen of Irrisen's attempts at usurping Baba Yaga in 4713 isn't going to change anything about what happens in Osirion in 4714. I think the only APs back in 1e that build on previous events are Rise of the Runelords -> Jade Regent -> Shattered Star -> Return of the Runelords.

The main exceptions I can think of are 2e APs: Strength of Thousands officially starts in 4721, but is assumed to take place over the course of several years as the PCs start out at students at the Magaambiya; and the current AP Season of Ghosts is supposed to take place like a century ago (I don't have the exact year).

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Shardstone said:

I have no idea how anything a metaplot does can "invalidate a home game." They aren't going into your house and telling you to use their new ideas. Nothing in your home game has to change.

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Staffan said:

It doesn't invalidate a home game, but it does make future material less useful.

My "favorite" example of metaplot effing things up was the Lands of Intrigue box set for Forgotten Realms back in 2e. I had read the entry for Tethyr in the campaign setting box: a land where the royal family had been assassinated ~20 years prior, and none of the major nobles/warlords had been capable of taking the whole land over – ripe for adventure, maybe pitting the warlords against one another, taking over a part at higher levels, and so on. And then when I got Lands of Intrigue, apparently that whole thing was over now. Turns out Elminster's secretary had been the Secret Heir (tm) all along, and hooked up with one of the nobles, recruited a bunch of folks from Waterdeep, and spent about a year and three novels taking the country back and gotten rid of the bad nobles, so now everything was hunky dory.

And that's why I prefer the Eberron approach to metaplot: it doesn't exist. Seed your setting with lots of adventure and campaign ideas, but the canonical setting is frozen. So maybe my setting had Aundair deciding they should really try to reclaim the western part of their land (who are pretending they're an independent nation named the Eldeen Reaches), while in your Eberron the Dreaming Dark are using their sleeper agents in house Deneith to offer the Cyran crown prince in exile aid in carving off a piece of Breland because that will cause chaos and make it easier for them to step in and "fix" things farther down the line. These are both things that make perfect sense in 998 YK, but may or may not work fine ten years later – just like a plot set in the USA of 1920 might not work as well in 1930.

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QuentinGeorge said:

FR was pretty much the worst candidate for metaplot.

Metaplot is fine for RPG settings, with the following caveat:

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