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As the Floods of strife threaten to rise once more, as the Scales tilt, we return to the lessons of those ancient, lest all, crowns and kingless alike, be carried away into the sunless churn of history.

The last years of the tenth millennium are a time of change on Kishar. Social and political upheavals, great migrations, and natural disasters within the past several centuries have reshaped cultures and societies across the world and are seemingly only continuing to accelerate. Some say it is simply the passing of history, but to others the looming turn of the millennium heralds something more...

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Primer on Kishar

Getting to know Kishar

See also: Kishar

The world of Kishar is a grab bag of various inspirations, but with a particular focus on the societies of ancient western Asia and the Mediterranean. I’ve tried to mix whatever piques my interest into a semi-coherent mess.

The inhabitants of the setting have had many thousands of years to travel, meet each other, trade, and exchange cultural practices, and as a result the world is highly interlinked and relatively cosmopolitan. Cities with a population of over 100,000 are not common but not particularly rare either, especially within the most densely urbanized areas. Regions might have broad demographic trends, but within the larger cities one might expect to find individuals of all manner of ancestries. Similarly, it is quite common to find people who are multilingual.

Most societies and governments on Kishar are republics, bureaucratic monarchies, theocracies, tribes, chiefdoms, miscellaneous autocracies, or something else entirely - feudalism, in its proper definition, is rather rare.

The major regions of Kishar

• The Three Great Seas
  • A relatively highly populated region, closely interconnected by networks of trade. Politically and economically heavily based on the eastern Mediterranean of the Bronze Age and early Iron Age, even if many cultures significantly diverge from this inspiration.
• The Wounds
  • A massive expanse of tropical islands dotting an endless ocean. Characterized by seafaring cultures that are generally, but not always, highly mobile.
• The Stormlands
  • A land shaped by constant positive and negative energy storms and the cultures that live in their shadows, split between the nomadic south, urbanized north, and anarchic highlands.
• The Spine
  • A continent dominated by a massive transverse mountain range and the craters left behind from multiple asteroid impacts. The people of the Spine live in one of two empires, or else in one of the smaller nations caught between them.

Game mechanics on Kishar

This setting was written first for Pathfinder 1e and then for Pathfinder 2e. Most, but not all, game mechanics that exist in PF 2e carry over to this setting - see below for the exceptions. Due to differences in setting, however, certain spells, archetypes, items, and so forth may need to be reflavored or recontextualized.

In any place on this wiki that mentions game mechanics, such as a deity's domains, assume they are written to be compatible with PF 2e.

Changed game mechanics

Certain game mechanics are altered from PF 2e. These changes do not exist as restrictions on player agency but rather to maintain the verisimilitude of the setting.

Teleportation magic

Long distance teleportation magic - that of a mile or more - fails to work reliably. Short distance hops are unaffected. See teleportation for more details.

Language magic

Spells that grant immediate knowledge of a language not previously known, like Comprehend Language, do not exist.

Planes

Compared to in PF 2e, the non-Material planes are far more poorly understood and traveled, even to the most experienced of adventurers and scholars. Many also either do not exist or are greatly changed. See planes for more details.

Religion

Religion on Kishar is changed from PF 2e's default setting, with gods and faith taking very different forms. See religion for more details.

Player agency on Kishar

See also: Campaigns

Kishar is intended as a living setting that players can, do, and should shape through their actions. All campaigns canonically happen and the setting shifts as a result.

Setting notes

Most of this stuff has no bearing on any campaign and probably never will. I just like to write. Regardless, here are some pages that might be useful:

• Nations
  • Overview of the broad regions of the world. I use the term "nations" but really that's not entirely accurate, as they may be defined by geography, shared culture, or by some other criteria.
• Timeline
  • An incomplete but ever-expanding timeline of events. This page may load slowly - please do not continually refresh or reload it unnecessarily, it's a bit of a performance problem.
  • The "current" year in-setting is Y9976^*. The world has a custom calendar that's basically a simplified Gregorian calendar. See timeline and timekeeping for more details.
• Organizations
  • Some organizations that are active within the world. Many of these have a wide or global scope in their interests and activities.
• Religion
  • Religion on Kishar is varied. Some people worship gods, while others prefer faiths centered around nature spirits, ancestor worship, or something else entirely.
  • If there is no god or religion that matches your character concept, let me know and we can figure out how to make it work.
• People
  • Characters you've met or might meet.
• Ancestries and Heritages
  • Many ancestries have shared culture or history on Kishar. This category is super incomplete right now. The pages here are meant to expand on resources elsewhere, not replace them entirely (for example, the elf page doesn't talk about everything, it's more to provide setting-specific shared perspective). Just because an ancestry doesn't have a page yet doesn't mean it doesn't exist in the setting.
• Topics
  • Miscellaneous topics I couldn't fit into another category.
• Creatures
  • Animals, monsters, that kind of thing.
• Languages
  • On Kishar, languages are much more regional than racial - there is no expectation that an elf in the Three Great Seas and an elf in the Stormlands, oceans apart, will understand the same language. Languages exist mostly for flavor and as a worldbuilding tool. If you want to pick up one or more of these then that's great, I'll do my best to make it worth it, but I don't expect it. I'd tell you in advance if anything other than Common was going to be necessary.

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