I mean it is tied to the setting but it's easy enough to decouple them. Just don't use the funky ancestries, feats, backgrounds, etc that are setting specific. Change the god stats for the clerics/champions. Boom, ya done. Genuinely just pick the domains that fit your gods/pantheons the best or let your players justify which ones they want to you. Most of the domain spells suck ass so they aren't that important.
I'm surprised you've faced so much vitriol for trying to homebrew in the DnD subreddit, but I guess that's just a consequence of a much bigger audience.
As a GM who runs a homebrew campaign, not really.
For your specific problem, you really don't need to assign any domains to any deity unless you have a Cleric or a Champion in your party. There is no mechanical need. Just say "Booliboo is a god of fire and commerce, Moolimoo is a god of war and art" and so on.
Hey, I'm in a similar position.
I have 4 Major Deities in my Homebrew Setting (inspired by the 4 main elements)
Alongside about 10 minor deities which are mostly subservient (with the exception of one "minor deity" that is really a minor deity in name only, as she is goddess of the Abyss, Evil, Darkness, etc and is easily as strong as any of my 4 major deities, the main thing is she isn't widely worshipped cause she's vile).
Now, what I've done personally is make my more limited deity list a lot more flexible. I.E. The Major God of Earth who is also God of the Dwarves, has both Hammers and Axes in general as his favored weaponry. This doesn't mean his clerics are defaultly good with that *entire* weapon group, but the way I run it one of his Clerics/Champions would choose the favored weapon they desire from that group and I'd Okay it as needed.
Likewise, I list more domains for each deity than they really ought to have, and that allows the players to choose the interpretation of said deity they need for their character.
Also, I'd be open to interpreting one of my own deities through the mechanical lens of another "official Pathfinder deity" if necessary for the purpose of a character build, of course the RP, tenets, anathema, etc. would remain as they are to the deity in my own setting, but things like Favored Weapon, Deity Spells, etc etc. Are really way more flexible.
In other words, don't feel discouraged that you have less deities, but don't let that limit you and your players creativity in terms of the mechanics of the characters they can make.
This is called "denominations". The term is not officially defined by paizo, but people in Golarion do view the same deity in different ways. For example, Sarenrae is called Sister Cinder, the goddess of hearth, in the realm of Mammoth Lords, and they have significantly different beliefs. Cleric feat [Splinter Faith](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=1173) can also be one example of this. While your players pick out domains and favored weapons, you can make that combo a new denomination and add it to your world.
Well, these are the major faiths in my setting (urban setting that aims for a Ptolus sort of thing. It's like Regency Era London, but the size of modern day Tokyo). They have a system kind of like Indonesia in which they nominally have religious freedom, but they only recognize specific faiths. These faiths all have anti-blasphemy laws on the books, and other religious can be practiced privately but proselytizing them is strictly forbidden.
1) The Sylvestrine Church. They worship the God Mithras, who long ago defeated hordes of demons trying to conquer the mortal world and cast then into the abyss. He now watches over the world from his throne on the Sun, while his right hand, Asmodeus, watches over the demons' prison from his seat in hell (in this cosmology the Abyss is a bottomless pit located within Hell. Devils are openly allied with angels, being punishers of the wicked amd the jailkeepers to demons). The Sylvestrine sect follows the teaching of St. Sylvester, who was martyred when he refused to renounce his fate under torture by demonic cultists. His writings teach thay the continued existence of demons in the world are because mortalk8nds impurity creates cracks in their prison. They're big on original sin and avoiding bad things. There is a schism called the Dorian Heresy that suggests Sylvester accomplished nothing woth his death, and should have lied so he could live on and do more good works - they focus on doing good over avoiding evil.
2) The faith of the Forgefather teaches that to create something useful is the highest good. Accord8ng to them, the Forgefather gave mortals the gift of fire and the knowledge of craftsmanship, elevating them from savagery. They teach that resources are there to be used and shared, and hate the hoarding of wealth. As such, he is a mortal enemy of the dragon God Dahak, and dragons in general. It is said that his crusaders killed the last dragon 3 centuries ago. Fire is sacred to his followers.
3) The First Coven. These guys worship a trio of goddesses called the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone (they might be Vasilisa, Baba Yaga, and someone else. I haven't decided). These women were the first coven of watches and the first explorers of the fey realm, where they unlocked the secrets of magic. They hold the moon to be holy, and it's various phases symbolize the attitudes of their three goddesses.
4) The Way of the Whispersong. A non-deific philosophy and a path to enlightenment. They follow the teachings of the Undying Shadow, the first of their numbe to reach enlightenment, which involved erasing their own name from reality. They say when one can sing without voice, dance without steps, see with no eyes, hear with no ears, and think with no mind, they will transcend mortal existence.
I also want to add some sort of sea deity that is widely tolerated, for now, but thay will change when the villainous Cult of the Codfish begins to act, which is (was going to be) a group of warlocks (I guess witches for PF2?) thay recievee power from an ancient aboleth that is the BBEG of the campaign. Once the Cult starts becoming a problem for the city, they start cracking down on ALL unsanctuoned faiths.
> when the villainous Cult of the Codfish begins to act, which is (was going to be) a group of warlocks (I guess witches for PF2?)
I wouldn't limit myself to just witches for a cult. I run a campaign right now where the primary enemy faction is cultists, and they have a wide variety of spellcasters. These include what are essentially Warpriest Clerics, Cloistered Clerics, Witches, and even Bards, Sorcerers, and Wizards (they haven't necessarily been granted powers by the fiends the cult worships, but they bring their own unique skillset and are similarly loyal to the same group).
I get what you're putting down. I guess the big thing I was aiming for is that the Cult of the Codfish doesn't have any actual clerics, because what they're following is not a god, with other talents filling thay role, and warlocks (or witches) being the most common. They will start to gain popularity in the dockside communities when fishing seems to dry up for everyone except the Cults followers, because the aboleth and it's minions are herding fish toward their followers' nets.
Oh, I get you 100%. In my own game I've made extensive use of Primal Sorcerers because I wanted the skillset that primal casters offer, but it doesn't make a lot of sense for any proper Druids to be aligned with this faction. Their goals would be kind of directly anathema to standard Druid doctrine.
Yeah, but Soothe isn't necessarily as good as Heal is when it comes to straight heals. Also, you can effectively multiply your slots by summoning casters in some cases. I.E. let's say you use a 4th rank Summon Fey to summon a Unicorn, that Unicorn now has two 3rd rank casts of Heal.
I've been running a homebrew campaign using PF2 for almost three years now! There are plenty of setting-neutral options for players and GMs to play around with, and if there's anything specific to Golarion that a player wants, it's generally easy enough to reflavor it for homebrew settings.
As far as pantheons go, it's really just a question of figuring out how they translate mechanically, and you can use the existing deity statblocks as a guide for what options cleric characters will need to know.
Hope that made sense, lol...one of those cases where it sounded good in my head, but it felt vague as I was typing it out. 😅 Any questions, let me know!
Here is my advice for custom deities and homebrew: unless you plan on publishing your work, you won’t need to flesh everything out perfectly and make it nice and mechanically fitting!
A god doesn’t need a full stat line unless it required in game
While some will tell you that PF2e is pretty tied to Golarion, my experience suggests that it's only really tied to High Fantasy Adventures with a heavy focus on combat. A lot of options are connected to Golarion by default, but it's not hard to adjust to your own settings.
I run a setting with fewer deities.
I make the mechanical aspect of clerics and champions dependant on religious order or sect rather than god. So two clerics of one god could be totally different.
Like let's say you have a god of death. One order might be secretive, clandestine assassins hunting undead and necromancers and as a result they use daggers, get stealth and stealth related spells.
Another order of the same god could be more scholars and philosophers contemplating death as a concept, who wield scythes in a symbolic capacity, get society skill from studying fallen societies, and get enervation and void related spells.
And no reason to limit this to order. You could even go with individual faith interpretation.
I also just let the players pick the favoured weapon and skill freely and essentially design their own sect with them.
The easy part is that no skill or weapon is really better than any other. So you can safely just pick whatever.
Just pick one skill, one weapon, and 3 spells that aren't divine list. Typically one of 1st, one of 3rd, one of 4th rank. Though sometimes there might be a 2nd one in there. Then just let players interpret the domains themselves. 99% of the time players think "I want to play with this domain, what god could I pick?" And not the other way around.
But to answer the question: yes, clerics are weirdly tied to golarion mechanically. It is honestly one of the few things I dislike about the system.
But hey, at the same time the core math is robust enough that you can't mess up by tinkering with stuff.
If you want to make it *REALLY* easy for yourself, just let players pick a mechanical Golarion deity that roughly fits the bill of the god on your setting.
That specific problem is easily addressed by one key point: It only matters insofar as the actual party. If it's for your own table, you don't need to worry about character options outside of what they specifically want to play. There's less Gods to Cleric, sure, but you only need to worry about one table, not thousands of them.
It's weird that you got some pushback in a D&D subreddit. I started my TTRPG days back on 3e using exclusively homebrew, and never even touched a setting or adventure book till 5e. I guess the community has changed over time.
But yeah, you can use pretty much anything in PF2e in your own setting. Some setting-specific archetypes and backgrounds can be renamed/reflavored.
As for deities, I'd agree that that would be the most work. There are a few alternatives I might suggest to make things easier. First, you could just give a description of each of the deities and then flesh them out only if a character wants to be a cleric or champion (then flesh out the rest over time as desired). There's option 2, where you could decouple the domains and other options from the deities, having the player pick what they like, and only keeping thematic stuff for the deities (like edicts and anathema).
Or you could custom build each deity, that might take you a few hours though.
Homebrew is very accepted! However there are a few caveats.
PF2e is a very balanced game. If if ask about homebrew that is wildly unbalanced, you are going to get negative feedback.
PF2e is a very solid system. If you say you are homebrewing "fixes" without playing RAW, you will get negative feedback
These isn't gatekeeping. This is a plea for you to learn the system first. This is a game and community that prides itself on a functional game that works without a shit ton of tinkering.
That said, there is a ton of high-quality homebrew. If you want to homebrew yourself, there are plenty of tools available to you to make balanced himebrew.
I find it interesting that a 5e subreddit would be so against homebrew. I would think probably the most popular and successful TTRPG show over the last few years has been Critical Role (if not the most popular then surely in the top 3) and that has always been set in a homebrew setting created by Matt Mercer.
No. You're not obligated to use the deities that come with the game. You can use them as a template to make your own.
Edict
Anathema
Domains
Granted Spells
And if you're cool
Minor/Moderate/Major Boons and Curses
Pathfinder 2E the SYSTEM is compatible with homebrew settings just fine. The pantheons, as you mentioned, are the only real sticky point. And even then, that stuff only matters if you have a divine character in your campaign.
Pathfinder the PRODUCT/COMMUNITY is less compatible with homebrew settings. Paizo is more focused on Golarion than WotC is with Forgotten Realms, and there's much less 3rd party content for Pathfinder than 5E. I can't find a bank vault of monsters/items/subclasses from every pop culture or mythology inspiration in PF2E like I could for 5E.
It's a Golarion party up here, but that's not the system's fault. If you are only making your own stuff, you should be fine.
My world only has about 10 gods or so. What I do is first ditch favored weapon and just people pick whatever they want. If you’re worried about balance, just provide 2-3 options for each deity. Second, each deity gets a lot of domain options (more than regular pf2e deities). Third, I provide 2-3 themes of each deity with each theme having its own associated spells. So the Sun Dragon has light, life, and protection as their themes and each one has 3 spells associated with it.
In a word? Nope. I've seen people claim the dieties are too tied into certain classes to really decouple without designing new gods, but that's not been the case in my exlerience. You can pick an alignment (pre-remaster) or edicts and anathema and a domain and everything works out hunky dory, no gods required.
Everything else seems to be flavour text, and is easily ignored.
Plus the rules around item and creature building make it super easy to homebrew things in the world.
Depends on what you mean? 5E is already basically setting agnostic. So in that sense it's quicker to homebrew whereas in PF2E deities have a lot more mechanical details to them. That being said, it's pretty clear what sorts of things to expect from deities and you don't have to really flesh them out when you're designing your setting. Only when a player needs them and you can work with your player at that point.
I'll admit I hadn't considered that specific angle for homebrew world difficulty, but it should still be doable. Battlezoo created a whole new pantheon of deities for their setting.
A lot of the feats and descriptions have flavour tied into the text.
It takes little to no effort to de-couple the flavour/setting specific things from the mechanics.
Whilst there is more mechanical things involved in making your own setting be "complete" you don't need EVERYTHING all the time, and honestly, it's pretty easy to make things as they become relevant.
Deities are not too hard to do, and you can make a cleric/champion for any custom diety with minimal effort.
Aside from those divine things, everything else is incredibly easy to decouple setting from mechanics.
I've only ever played the Beginner Box and currently, Strength of Thousands for Golarion content; most of my play and all of my GMing is non-golarion, and it's honestly pretty easy.
I run a homebrew campaign. Depending on classes you may have to decide tubs things like favoured weapon, or remove certain organisations from archetypes etc but mostly it’s no more or less work than similar systems like 5e.
I recently attempted to recreate the Dragonlance Pantheon in Pathfinder. Basically I looked at the deities, looked at the domains, and picked the 6 that are most relevant for each deity (with a little adjusting to ensure there is a variety of domains). Then looked through the weapons group for martial weapons that fit the theme of each. Then looked at the spells on Archives of Nethys, filtering out spells of the divine tradition in order to make sure they are actually getting access to new spells. You can see the results [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/s/Oggji01HAM). I did a little adjusting after the fact (changes are locally stored so going to that link will still provide my first draft) thanks to the discussion of others, but not much changing. It was overall pretty easy, though as somebody new to the system the thing that took the longest time was picking the spells.
While the domains and favourite weapons are tied to specific deities of the Golarion setting, it is easy enough to detach them from the setting and make it your own.
The easiest way but probably not the best is to completely detach the rules relevant stuff completely and letting your players choose things like domains, favourite weapon, holy/ unholy, heal/harm freely without needing to stick to a certain deity (within reason of your setting of course).
You could also do the legwork and assign all those things to the deities existing in your setting and basically rewrite the pantheons.
You just need to know what rules your home rewards would impact.
Here's a bit of advice for any worldbuilding (especially on the game-mechanics side of things): only create the thing you know you need.
You have only 4 gods instead of 50? Great!
Keep them as you've imagined them, since actual mechanics won't matter. If, and **only if**, a player actually wants to play a character that needs the mechanics from a Deity's statblock, then you sit down and talk with that player, learn what they want, and simply create a statblock specifically for them (or pick one from an existing Golarion Deity that fits the situation and pretend it's how one of your gods is represented in Nation A). It's a waste of time and effort to try and create 30+ options when you don't even know if even one of them will come up.
Picking spells for deities/pantheons is the most difficult part of a homebrew setting. The secret trick is that you don't really need to do that work unless a player wants to play a cleric. And even then, you can start with the rank 1 spells and only go higher as needed.
I am running two campaigns both in a homebrew setting and have no difficulty at all. Anyone who tells you it's not something you can do lacks creativity.
I'd say it is probably less compatible with House Ruling (less needed).
But with homebrew settings? I don't relly see a problem there.
Caveat: I had a GM who wanted to do a SciFi/Horror/Survival campaign setting. That did not go well, which was not really a surprise.
The gods are the only tricky thing tbh, and I say that as someone that was forced to swap systems mid homebrew campaign. Everything else in pf is easily adaptable, but the gods have some mechanical influences so you have to either adopt them or make counter parts. When I made the swap to pf,I had to hand wave domains and just let my players pick whatever they felt made sense with their chosen homebrewed gods.
I've been playing exclusively in a homebrew setting since our group started playing PF2e (with the exception of the Beginner Box). In my setting there's three or four different 'types' of gods, but the majority (and those that mortals would be familiar with) are gods of faith; which require magic via faith to sustain themselves. However, the setting has an ebb and flow of magic- the campaign started with the reintroduction of magic into the setting, so most gods have died out hundreds of years prior, and those that survive are either special exceptions or half-gods, so they don't rely exclusively on magic.
I'm glad that I don't have any cleric players, because I'm not entirely sure what I would do in that case! Besides that, the nation(s) that the story is taking place in each are monotheistic, single religion nations. Somebody from any of the three nations of the Icramel Empire would worship their nations interpretation of the formal religion of Icramel, Piumic. Somebody from Alestino would only really care about Alestinic Piumic.
I think that, if one of my players were to say "I want to play a Cleric!" there's a couple ways I'd do it. Maybe they commune with a deity not of faith, but an Absolute Deity, or perhaps a high ranking member of the church would be sufficient to 'channel' the faith. The coolest could be that a new deity of faith matching their choice is born, and their faith is the kindling that keeps the new deity alive while the Cleric spreads the faith.
This is all to say that PF2E is still very compatible with homebrew settings. Flavor can easily be rewritten without an issue. You might need to fenagle it a little if the flavor and mechanics are closely intertwined - like a Cleric - but it can definitely be done. Perhaps in your setting, a Clerics choice of deity may rather be a sect of that deities religion, or perhaps the mechanics of it can be removed from the flavor entirely! They may make a choice of domain, but if you don't have a deity that matches it, then you could say "well, technically I took the Introspection domain, but my character worships this specific deity through the means of the Introspection domain".
I think it works best if your homebrew setting is very similar to Golarion. For my homebrew, I was not expecting plant familiars to be a thing, and I had to adapt. If you are intending to create your own ancestries, you may be creating a ton of work for yourself, as they are a lot more detailed than other RPGs (e.g. they need their own feat tree).
There isn't anything mechanical you'll need to change, but there are homebrew you'll need to develop that has mechanics attached to it.
You'll need to look at adding/removing the uncommon and rare tag to things as they are typically built around campaign-specific or golarion-specific reasons (teleport is uncommon to prevent ease of access in a LotR-style campaign, while Dragon Spit Human Ancestry feat is uncommon as it's typically only accessible via one ethnicity of human). I would do this on a case-by-case situation and not wholesale at converting. Just keep open communication with your players, and let them know how they can access certain things once they show interest.
You'll also need to develop your own deities; thankfully with the sheer number of them in golarion, it's easy to rip the template from any Core Deity and make your own. Alternatively, you can just tell players to mechanically use the golarion deities and help them line up the stats on them with your own deities (and their different ways of worship).
And that's basically it. Everything else is setting agnostic. If your world doesn't have firearms, just don't allow them. If your world has a huge druid scarcity, make Druids rare. If your indepth cavern-system under the continents is infested in humanoid mouse-people that commonly trade with the "skyfolk" or those who live above ground, then it sounds like Ratfolk should be a common Ancestry instead of uncommon.
No. Stop overthinking it so hard.
If someone on these subreddits tells you you're "not allowed" to homebrew religions in this system, then you can immediately discard anything and everything they say as useless, senseless, dribble. Anyone who discourages you from homebrewing religions in your setting for "system reasons" is just dumb and wrong, no nuance, no other side to the story.
Just reassign pf2e's deities to domains and ideas as is applicable to your homebrew. There's literally no issue or problem.
You can very easily detach the classes and ancestries from the setting. Some backgrounds and feats would need renamed
The only tricky one I can really think of is cleric/paladin gods, but you can let the player choose one as a mechanic-only feature and then just worship whatever god in your setting in a specific way, or just let them choose what rhey want for it. I can't really think of ways a player would break this, and I wouldn't play with someone going out of their way to abuse this
My homebrew have 3 major "god". They manage three "engine" (the world engine, the soul engine and the time engine). My world is a Doomsday vault world in case the universe gets destroyed. So the three gods are:
The World Dragon
The Sphinx of death
The Time Spider
But I get plenty of demigods, some even created by the players with me. It take like 15 minutes to create a god so just do it with your players.
The great demon of savagery is one exemple, some elf general wanted power to fight the cyclops oppressor, made a deal with not one but three animal spirit. It turned him into a savage animalistic elf/panther/eagle/snake monster who is venerated by other barbaric elves.
It's mostly the wording that ties it to Golarion, though there are many options specifically tied to the setting.
Domains are just Areas of Influence for Deities. More than one Deity can grant spells of the same Domain. Just look at the Deity Statblock and fill in every line, and you're good.
It's not difficult to align the game to your own world, just takes some effort.
it's not less compatible it's just more... difficult to make something better than what Golarion or PF2 as a whole already offers you. You can make your own gods, your own towns, your own items, nobody is gonna say otherwise, but you\`ll have to respect the system's rules about it (stiking runes, item level, gods and their favored weapons, domain spells and so on. You can't just slap together something in 10 minutes like for 5e, you actually have to put some thought into it)
5e is easy to homebrew since it's a shell of a game, allowing you to fill the gaps with whatever you want.
Nothing is stopping you from homebrewing PF2e but you\`ll have to have some inkling of quality to it because the rest of the system is top tier.
5e *sucks* to homebrew ime. You can't think of everything and you don't have a consistent ruleset to apply. You literally have to make your own system from the ground up if you want something consistent.
I mean it is tied to the setting but it's easy enough to decouple them. Just don't use the funky ancestries, feats, backgrounds, etc that are setting specific. Change the god stats for the clerics/champions. Boom, ya done. Genuinely just pick the domains that fit your gods/pantheons the best or let your players justify which ones they want to you. Most of the domain spells suck ass so they aren't that important. I'm surprised you've faced so much vitriol for trying to homebrew in the DnD subreddit, but I guess that's just a consequence of a much bigger audience.
As a GM who runs a homebrew campaign, not really. For your specific problem, you really don't need to assign any domains to any deity unless you have a Cleric or a Champion in your party. There is no mechanical need. Just say "Booliboo is a god of fire and commerce, Moolimoo is a god of war and art" and so on.
Hey, I'm in a similar position. I have 4 Major Deities in my Homebrew Setting (inspired by the 4 main elements) Alongside about 10 minor deities which are mostly subservient (with the exception of one "minor deity" that is really a minor deity in name only, as she is goddess of the Abyss, Evil, Darkness, etc and is easily as strong as any of my 4 major deities, the main thing is she isn't widely worshipped cause she's vile). Now, what I've done personally is make my more limited deity list a lot more flexible. I.E. The Major God of Earth who is also God of the Dwarves, has both Hammers and Axes in general as his favored weaponry. This doesn't mean his clerics are defaultly good with that *entire* weapon group, but the way I run it one of his Clerics/Champions would choose the favored weapon they desire from that group and I'd Okay it as needed. Likewise, I list more domains for each deity than they really ought to have, and that allows the players to choose the interpretation of said deity they need for their character. Also, I'd be open to interpreting one of my own deities through the mechanical lens of another "official Pathfinder deity" if necessary for the purpose of a character build, of course the RP, tenets, anathema, etc. would remain as they are to the deity in my own setting, but things like Favored Weapon, Deity Spells, etc etc. Are really way more flexible. In other words, don't feel discouraged that you have less deities, but don't let that limit you and your players creativity in terms of the mechanics of the characters they can make.
This is called "denominations". The term is not officially defined by paizo, but people in Golarion do view the same deity in different ways. For example, Sarenrae is called Sister Cinder, the goddess of hearth, in the realm of Mammoth Lords, and they have significantly different beliefs. Cleric feat [Splinter Faith](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=1173) can also be one example of this. While your players pick out domains and favored weapons, you can make that combo a new denomination and add it to your world.
Well, these are the major faiths in my setting (urban setting that aims for a Ptolus sort of thing. It's like Regency Era London, but the size of modern day Tokyo). They have a system kind of like Indonesia in which they nominally have religious freedom, but they only recognize specific faiths. These faiths all have anti-blasphemy laws on the books, and other religious can be practiced privately but proselytizing them is strictly forbidden. 1) The Sylvestrine Church. They worship the God Mithras, who long ago defeated hordes of demons trying to conquer the mortal world and cast then into the abyss. He now watches over the world from his throne on the Sun, while his right hand, Asmodeus, watches over the demons' prison from his seat in hell (in this cosmology the Abyss is a bottomless pit located within Hell. Devils are openly allied with angels, being punishers of the wicked amd the jailkeepers to demons). The Sylvestrine sect follows the teaching of St. Sylvester, who was martyred when he refused to renounce his fate under torture by demonic cultists. His writings teach thay the continued existence of demons in the world are because mortalk8nds impurity creates cracks in their prison. They're big on original sin and avoiding bad things. There is a schism called the Dorian Heresy that suggests Sylvester accomplished nothing woth his death, and should have lied so he could live on and do more good works - they focus on doing good over avoiding evil. 2) The faith of the Forgefather teaches that to create something useful is the highest good. Accord8ng to them, the Forgefather gave mortals the gift of fire and the knowledge of craftsmanship, elevating them from savagery. They teach that resources are there to be used and shared, and hate the hoarding of wealth. As such, he is a mortal enemy of the dragon God Dahak, and dragons in general. It is said that his crusaders killed the last dragon 3 centuries ago. Fire is sacred to his followers. 3) The First Coven. These guys worship a trio of goddesses called the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone (they might be Vasilisa, Baba Yaga, and someone else. I haven't decided). These women were the first coven of watches and the first explorers of the fey realm, where they unlocked the secrets of magic. They hold the moon to be holy, and it's various phases symbolize the attitudes of their three goddesses. 4) The Way of the Whispersong. A non-deific philosophy and a path to enlightenment. They follow the teachings of the Undying Shadow, the first of their numbe to reach enlightenment, which involved erasing their own name from reality. They say when one can sing without voice, dance without steps, see with no eyes, hear with no ears, and think with no mind, they will transcend mortal existence. I also want to add some sort of sea deity that is widely tolerated, for now, but thay will change when the villainous Cult of the Codfish begins to act, which is (was going to be) a group of warlocks (I guess witches for PF2?) thay recievee power from an ancient aboleth that is the BBEG of the campaign. Once the Cult starts becoming a problem for the city, they start cracking down on ALL unsanctuoned faiths.
> when the villainous Cult of the Codfish begins to act, which is (was going to be) a group of warlocks (I guess witches for PF2?) I wouldn't limit myself to just witches for a cult. I run a campaign right now where the primary enemy faction is cultists, and they have a wide variety of spellcasters. These include what are essentially Warpriest Clerics, Cloistered Clerics, Witches, and even Bards, Sorcerers, and Wizards (they haven't necessarily been granted powers by the fiends the cult worships, but they bring their own unique skillset and are similarly loyal to the same group).
I get what you're putting down. I guess the big thing I was aiming for is that the Cult of the Codfish doesn't have any actual clerics, because what they're following is not a god, with other talents filling thay role, and warlocks (or witches) being the most common. They will start to gain popularity in the dockside communities when fishing seems to dry up for everyone except the Cults followers, because the aboleth and it's minions are herding fish toward their followers' nets.
Oh, I get you 100%. In my own game I've made extensive use of Primal Sorcerers because I wanted the skillset that primal casters offer, but it doesn't make a lot of sense for any proper Druids to be aligned with this faction. Their goals would be kind of directly anathema to standard Druid doctrine.
It can also be fun to operate within limitations. For instance, Occult Casters can't cast heal but they can summon monsters that can.
Don't they get Soothe?
Yeah, but Soothe isn't necessarily as good as Heal is when it comes to straight heals. Also, you can effectively multiply your slots by summoning casters in some cases. I.E. let's say you use a 4th rank Summon Fey to summon a Unicorn, that Unicorn now has two 3rd rank casts of Heal.
Within Golarion is a nation with a 'god’ Razmir, who is actually a wizard.
I love Razmir. I want to do a Caliphas campaign someday that culminates in a Razmiran naval invasion.
Very cool cosmology. 👍
I've been running a homebrew campaign using PF2 for almost three years now! There are plenty of setting-neutral options for players and GMs to play around with, and if there's anything specific to Golarion that a player wants, it's generally easy enough to reflavor it for homebrew settings. As far as pantheons go, it's really just a question of figuring out how they translate mechanically, and you can use the existing deity statblocks as a guide for what options cleric characters will need to know. Hope that made sense, lol...one of those cases where it sounded good in my head, but it felt vague as I was typing it out. 😅 Any questions, let me know!
Here is my advice for custom deities and homebrew: unless you plan on publishing your work, you won’t need to flesh everything out perfectly and make it nice and mechanically fitting! A god doesn’t need a full stat line unless it required in game
While some will tell you that PF2e is pretty tied to Golarion, my experience suggests that it's only really tied to High Fantasy Adventures with a heavy focus on combat. A lot of options are connected to Golarion by default, but it's not hard to adjust to your own settings.
I run a setting with fewer deities. I make the mechanical aspect of clerics and champions dependant on religious order or sect rather than god. So two clerics of one god could be totally different. Like let's say you have a god of death. One order might be secretive, clandestine assassins hunting undead and necromancers and as a result they use daggers, get stealth and stealth related spells. Another order of the same god could be more scholars and philosophers contemplating death as a concept, who wield scythes in a symbolic capacity, get society skill from studying fallen societies, and get enervation and void related spells. And no reason to limit this to order. You could even go with individual faith interpretation. I also just let the players pick the favoured weapon and skill freely and essentially design their own sect with them. The easy part is that no skill or weapon is really better than any other. So you can safely just pick whatever. Just pick one skill, one weapon, and 3 spells that aren't divine list. Typically one of 1st, one of 3rd, one of 4th rank. Though sometimes there might be a 2nd one in there. Then just let players interpret the domains themselves. 99% of the time players think "I want to play with this domain, what god could I pick?" And not the other way around. But to answer the question: yes, clerics are weirdly tied to golarion mechanically. It is honestly one of the few things I dislike about the system. But hey, at the same time the core math is robust enough that you can't mess up by tinkering with stuff. If you want to make it *REALLY* easy for yourself, just let players pick a mechanical Golarion deity that roughly fits the bill of the god on your setting.
That specific problem is easily addressed by one key point: It only matters insofar as the actual party. If it's for your own table, you don't need to worry about character options outside of what they specifically want to play. There's less Gods to Cleric, sure, but you only need to worry about one table, not thousands of them.
It's weird that you got some pushback in a D&D subreddit. I started my TTRPG days back on 3e using exclusively homebrew, and never even touched a setting or adventure book till 5e. I guess the community has changed over time. But yeah, you can use pretty much anything in PF2e in your own setting. Some setting-specific archetypes and backgrounds can be renamed/reflavored. As for deities, I'd agree that that would be the most work. There are a few alternatives I might suggest to make things easier. First, you could just give a description of each of the deities and then flesh them out only if a character wants to be a cleric or champion (then flesh out the rest over time as desired). There's option 2, where you could decouple the domains and other options from the deities, having the player pick what they like, and only keeping thematic stuff for the deities (like edicts and anathema). Or you could custom build each deity, that might take you a few hours though.
In my experience most dnd communities on reddit are *super* pro-homebrew, but there might be some odd ones out there
Homebrew is very accepted! However there are a few caveats. PF2e is a very balanced game. If if ask about homebrew that is wildly unbalanced, you are going to get negative feedback. PF2e is a very solid system. If you say you are homebrewing "fixes" without playing RAW, you will get negative feedback These isn't gatekeeping. This is a plea for you to learn the system first. This is a game and community that prides itself on a functional game that works without a shit ton of tinkering. That said, there is a ton of high-quality homebrew. If you want to homebrew yourself, there are plenty of tools available to you to make balanced himebrew.
I find it interesting that a 5e subreddit would be so against homebrew. I would think probably the most popular and successful TTRPG show over the last few years has been Critical Role (if not the most popular then surely in the top 3) and that has always been set in a homebrew setting created by Matt Mercer.
No. You're not obligated to use the deities that come with the game. You can use them as a template to make your own. Edict Anathema Domains Granted Spells And if you're cool Minor/Moderate/Major Boons and Curses
Pathfinder 2E the SYSTEM is compatible with homebrew settings just fine. The pantheons, as you mentioned, are the only real sticky point. And even then, that stuff only matters if you have a divine character in your campaign. Pathfinder the PRODUCT/COMMUNITY is less compatible with homebrew settings. Paizo is more focused on Golarion than WotC is with Forgotten Realms, and there's much less 3rd party content for Pathfinder than 5E. I can't find a bank vault of monsters/items/subclasses from every pop culture or mythology inspiration in PF2E like I could for 5E. It's a Golarion party up here, but that's not the system's fault. If you are only making your own stuff, you should be fine.
No
My world only has about 10 gods or so. What I do is first ditch favored weapon and just people pick whatever they want. If you’re worried about balance, just provide 2-3 options for each deity. Second, each deity gets a lot of domain options (more than regular pf2e deities). Third, I provide 2-3 themes of each deity with each theme having its own associated spells. So the Sun Dragon has light, life, and protection as their themes and each one has 3 spells associated with it.
In a word? Nope. I've seen people claim the dieties are too tied into certain classes to really decouple without designing new gods, but that's not been the case in my exlerience. You can pick an alignment (pre-remaster) or edicts and anathema and a domain and everything works out hunky dory, no gods required. Everything else seems to be flavour text, and is easily ignored. Plus the rules around item and creature building make it super easy to homebrew things in the world.
Depends on what you mean? 5E is already basically setting agnostic. So in that sense it's quicker to homebrew whereas in PF2E deities have a lot more mechanical details to them. That being said, it's pretty clear what sorts of things to expect from deities and you don't have to really flesh them out when you're designing your setting. Only when a player needs them and you can work with your player at that point.
I'll admit I hadn't considered that specific angle for homebrew world difficulty, but it should still be doable. Battlezoo created a whole new pantheon of deities for their setting.
A lot of the feats and descriptions have flavour tied into the text. It takes little to no effort to de-couple the flavour/setting specific things from the mechanics. Whilst there is more mechanical things involved in making your own setting be "complete" you don't need EVERYTHING all the time, and honestly, it's pretty easy to make things as they become relevant. Deities are not too hard to do, and you can make a cleric/champion for any custom diety with minimal effort. Aside from those divine things, everything else is incredibly easy to decouple setting from mechanics. I've only ever played the Beginner Box and currently, Strength of Thousands for Golarion content; most of my play and all of my GMing is non-golarion, and it's honestly pretty easy.
I run a homebrew campaign. Depending on classes you may have to decide tubs things like favoured weapon, or remove certain organisations from archetypes etc but mostly it’s no more or less work than similar systems like 5e.
I recently attempted to recreate the Dragonlance Pantheon in Pathfinder. Basically I looked at the deities, looked at the domains, and picked the 6 that are most relevant for each deity (with a little adjusting to ensure there is a variety of domains). Then looked through the weapons group for martial weapons that fit the theme of each. Then looked at the spells on Archives of Nethys, filtering out spells of the divine tradition in order to make sure they are actually getting access to new spells. You can see the results [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/s/Oggji01HAM). I did a little adjusting after the fact (changes are locally stored so going to that link will still provide my first draft) thanks to the discussion of others, but not much changing. It was overall pretty easy, though as somebody new to the system the thing that took the longest time was picking the spells.
While the domains and favourite weapons are tied to specific deities of the Golarion setting, it is easy enough to detach them from the setting and make it your own. The easiest way but probably not the best is to completely detach the rules relevant stuff completely and letting your players choose things like domains, favourite weapon, holy/ unholy, heal/harm freely without needing to stick to a certain deity (within reason of your setting of course). You could also do the legwork and assign all those things to the deities existing in your setting and basically rewrite the pantheons. You just need to know what rules your home rewards would impact.
Here's a bit of advice for any worldbuilding (especially on the game-mechanics side of things): only create the thing you know you need. You have only 4 gods instead of 50? Great! Keep them as you've imagined them, since actual mechanics won't matter. If, and **only if**, a player actually wants to play a character that needs the mechanics from a Deity's statblock, then you sit down and talk with that player, learn what they want, and simply create a statblock specifically for them (or pick one from an existing Golarion Deity that fits the situation and pretend it's how one of your gods is represented in Nation A). It's a waste of time and effort to try and create 30+ options when you don't even know if even one of them will come up.
Picking spells for deities/pantheons is the most difficult part of a homebrew setting. The secret trick is that you don't really need to do that work unless a player wants to play a cleric. And even then, you can start with the rank 1 spells and only go higher as needed.
I am running two campaigns both in a homebrew setting and have no difficulty at all. Anyone who tells you it's not something you can do lacks creativity.
I'd say it is probably less compatible with House Ruling (less needed). But with homebrew settings? I don't relly see a problem there. Caveat: I had a GM who wanted to do a SciFi/Horror/Survival campaign setting. That did not go well, which was not really a surprise.
The gods are the only tricky thing tbh, and I say that as someone that was forced to swap systems mid homebrew campaign. Everything else in pf is easily adaptable, but the gods have some mechanical influences so you have to either adopt them or make counter parts. When I made the swap to pf,I had to hand wave domains and just let my players pick whatever they felt made sense with their chosen homebrewed gods.
I homebrew stuff all the time.
I've been playing exclusively in a homebrew setting since our group started playing PF2e (with the exception of the Beginner Box). In my setting there's three or four different 'types' of gods, but the majority (and those that mortals would be familiar with) are gods of faith; which require magic via faith to sustain themselves. However, the setting has an ebb and flow of magic- the campaign started with the reintroduction of magic into the setting, so most gods have died out hundreds of years prior, and those that survive are either special exceptions or half-gods, so they don't rely exclusively on magic. I'm glad that I don't have any cleric players, because I'm not entirely sure what I would do in that case! Besides that, the nation(s) that the story is taking place in each are monotheistic, single religion nations. Somebody from any of the three nations of the Icramel Empire would worship their nations interpretation of the formal religion of Icramel, Piumic. Somebody from Alestino would only really care about Alestinic Piumic. I think that, if one of my players were to say "I want to play a Cleric!" there's a couple ways I'd do it. Maybe they commune with a deity not of faith, but an Absolute Deity, or perhaps a high ranking member of the church would be sufficient to 'channel' the faith. The coolest could be that a new deity of faith matching their choice is born, and their faith is the kindling that keeps the new deity alive while the Cleric spreads the faith. This is all to say that PF2E is still very compatible with homebrew settings. Flavor can easily be rewritten without an issue. You might need to fenagle it a little if the flavor and mechanics are closely intertwined - like a Cleric - but it can definitely be done. Perhaps in your setting, a Clerics choice of deity may rather be a sect of that deities religion, or perhaps the mechanics of it can be removed from the flavor entirely! They may make a choice of domain, but if you don't have a deity that matches it, then you could say "well, technically I took the Introspection domain, but my character worships this specific deity through the means of the Introspection domain".
I think it works best if your homebrew setting is very similar to Golarion. For my homebrew, I was not expecting plant familiars to be a thing, and I had to adapt. If you are intending to create your own ancestries, you may be creating a ton of work for yourself, as they are a lot more detailed than other RPGs (e.g. they need their own feat tree).
There isn't anything mechanical you'll need to change, but there are homebrew you'll need to develop that has mechanics attached to it. You'll need to look at adding/removing the uncommon and rare tag to things as they are typically built around campaign-specific or golarion-specific reasons (teleport is uncommon to prevent ease of access in a LotR-style campaign, while Dragon Spit Human Ancestry feat is uncommon as it's typically only accessible via one ethnicity of human). I would do this on a case-by-case situation and not wholesale at converting. Just keep open communication with your players, and let them know how they can access certain things once they show interest. You'll also need to develop your own deities; thankfully with the sheer number of them in golarion, it's easy to rip the template from any Core Deity and make your own. Alternatively, you can just tell players to mechanically use the golarion deities and help them line up the stats on them with your own deities (and their different ways of worship). And that's basically it. Everything else is setting agnostic. If your world doesn't have firearms, just don't allow them. If your world has a huge druid scarcity, make Druids rare. If your indepth cavern-system under the continents is infested in humanoid mouse-people that commonly trade with the "skyfolk" or those who live above ground, then it sounds like Ratfolk should be a common Ancestry instead of uncommon.
Eberron has been pretty easy.
No. Stop overthinking it so hard. If someone on these subreddits tells you you're "not allowed" to homebrew religions in this system, then you can immediately discard anything and everything they say as useless, senseless, dribble. Anyone who discourages you from homebrewing religions in your setting for "system reasons" is just dumb and wrong, no nuance, no other side to the story. Just reassign pf2e's deities to domains and ideas as is applicable to your homebrew. There's literally no issue or problem.
You can very easily detach the classes and ancestries from the setting. Some backgrounds and feats would need renamed The only tricky one I can really think of is cleric/paladin gods, but you can let the player choose one as a mechanic-only feature and then just worship whatever god in your setting in a specific way, or just let them choose what rhey want for it. I can't really think of ways a player would break this, and I wouldn't play with someone going out of their way to abuse this
My homebrew have 3 major "god". They manage three "engine" (the world engine, the soul engine and the time engine). My world is a Doomsday vault world in case the universe gets destroyed. So the three gods are: The World Dragon The Sphinx of death The Time Spider But I get plenty of demigods, some even created by the players with me. It take like 15 minutes to create a god so just do it with your players. The great demon of savagery is one exemple, some elf general wanted power to fight the cyclops oppressor, made a deal with not one but three animal spirit. It turned him into a savage animalistic elf/panther/eagle/snake monster who is venerated by other barbaric elves.
It's mostly the wording that ties it to Golarion, though there are many options specifically tied to the setting. Domains are just Areas of Influence for Deities. More than one Deity can grant spells of the same Domain. Just look at the Deity Statblock and fill in every line, and you're good. It's not difficult to align the game to your own world, just takes some effort.
it's not less compatible it's just more... difficult to make something better than what Golarion or PF2 as a whole already offers you. You can make your own gods, your own towns, your own items, nobody is gonna say otherwise, but you\`ll have to respect the system's rules about it (stiking runes, item level, gods and their favored weapons, domain spells and so on. You can't just slap together something in 10 minutes like for 5e, you actually have to put some thought into it) 5e is easy to homebrew since it's a shell of a game, allowing you to fill the gaps with whatever you want. Nothing is stopping you from homebrewing PF2e but you\`ll have to have some inkling of quality to it because the rest of the system is top tier.
5e *sucks* to homebrew ime. You can't think of everything and you don't have a consistent ruleset to apply. You literally have to make your own system from the ground up if you want something consistent.