Pathfinder’s Asian-inspired Tian Xia World Guide is stacked with talent

By Md Umar Khan On Mar 19, 2024

Last year’s controversy surrounding the Dungeons & Dragons Open Gaming License not only damaged Wizards of the Coast’s relationship with its biggest fans, but also helped to turbocharge the sales of competing game systems. Chief among them was Paizo’s Pathfinder, which sold through nearly a years’ worth of stock in just a matter of weeks. Now the Washington state-based publisher is throwing some serious funding behind its marquee fantasy role-playing franchise. It’s next effort, Pathfinder Lost Omens: Tian Xia World Guide, boasts a team of more than 40 authors. Polygon sat down with senior designer James Case to learn more.

Tian Xia is a massive Asian-inspired continent in Pathfinder’s fictional world of Golarion, home to 26 distinct nations and kingdoms. To help bring them to life, Case said it was important to team up with writers who could speak to the Asian experience.

“Almost everyone on the book is Asian, or part Asian, or from the diaspora,” said Case, who is also of Asian descent. “I think a lot of the othering tropes in fantasy come from taking a very monolithic view of a culture, or a fantasy race, or a time period, and I think it’s clear looking at some of the work that we’ve been doing in [Pathfinder Second Edition] have really tried to set the viewpoint from within the nation itself, [and asking] how would the people describe themselves, rather than this sort of assumed view of coming in from outside.”

Two women of East Asian descent duke it out with viscious looking sticks. Their clothes are shades of orange, and their feet are colored by what looks like red dust or dye. — Mugura and Nrithu, the paired dieties of rivalry and competition, are a delightful addition to *Pathfinder*’s expansive pantheon. “We’ve jokingly described them as the, as the ‘lovers to rivals deity,’” Case told Polygon.

Case’s co-authors include the following: Eren Ahn, Jeremy Blum, Alyx Bui, Banana Chan, Connie Chang, Rick Chia, Hans Chun, Theta Chun, Hiromi Cota, Dana Ebert, Basheer Ghouse, John Godek III, Sen H.H.S., Joan Hong, Michelle Jones, Joshua Kim, Daniel Kwan, Dash Kwiatkowski, Jacky Leung, Jesse J. Leung, Monte Lin, Jessie “Aki” Lo, Luis Loza, Adam Ma, Liane Merciel, Ashley Moni, Kevin Thien Vu Long Nguyen, Andrew Quon, Danita Rambo, K Arsenault Rivera, Christopher Rondeau, Joaquin Kyle “Makapatag” Saavedra, Kienna Shaw, Philip Shen, Tan Shao Han, Mari Tokuda, Ruvaid Virk, Viditya Voleti, Grady Wang, Emma Yasui, and Jay Zhang.

That diversity of experience, Case said, paid dividends in unexpected ways all throughout the manuscript — which includes everything from new and refreshed regional deities, to a bestiary brimming with new monsters.

A creature with a tiger’s stripes, a monkey’s face, the main of a lion, and a tail of a cobra. — “The nue is kind of a Japanese chimera-type creature that’s associated with lightning, and clouds and storms,” Case said. “That’s a classic monster that we didn’t have in the game, and it felt good to get it in here.”

“We have […] one author who was very experienced with Chinese traditional medicine,” Case said, “who gave us a look into how we might look at the medicine skill in the game, and how that might better align to sort of an Asian view of things. We have some people with archaeology degrees, we have some people who are based overseas and living [in Asia who] brought a lot of very nuanced cultural knowledge to the game. And of course, these are also people who are great fantasy writers and are happy to write about high fantasy conceits like monsters and deities and ghosts and all that.”

The Lady of Graves, also known as Golarion’s goddess Pharasma, looks different on the Continent of Tian Xia. “[Deities] come with their own deity statblocks, so if you want to be a cleric of one of these new deities that will tell you the spells you get, your domains, and your edicts and anathemas.”

In addition to factually grounding each of the more than 20 nations depicted inside the 304-page book within the larger world of Golarion, the writing team also provided more intimate day-in-the-life narratives for its people.

“Rather than just taking kind of one view and saying that this is how all of Tian Xia sort of does this thing, we look at how it might be different from each nation,” Case added. “If you’re in the far north, where you’re in the desert versus the far south where it’s a rainforest, obviously some things are going to be a little different. We have this space here to dive into it with enough nuance that. We hope that by showing a wide variety of experiences and a wide variety of cultural touchstones, we’ll get [across] the sense that this is a very diverse area.”

The print edition of Pathfinder Lost Omens: Tian Xia World Guide runs $79.99 with pre-orders shipping beginning April 24. A PDF version, which sells for $29.99, will be available that same day. A related book, Pathfinder Lost Omens: Tian Xia Character Guide, will be available this summer.

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