Lost Lights Players Guide – PF2e

Publisher: Side Quest PressLost Lights is a new and different campaign setting compatible with both 5e and PF 2E. It spans two primary continents – one populated by scattered societies recovering from a millennia-long war between now-vanished celestial overlords, the other dominated by a vast techno-theocracy trying to cope with the recent absence of gods previously known for their hands-on guidance.

The creative crew behind Side Quest Press has played tabletop roleplaying games for over 40 years, and for a while now we’ve discussed some missing elements in the industry’s creative space; game design companies have attempted to diversify their campaign settings over time but there’s still an element of “other-ism” to the fantastic foreign lands that take their inspiration from places besides Europe. Essentially, these diverse options are often presented (intentionally or not) as anything but the central thematic setting for these RPG worlds, almost as an afterthought to affirm the “real” story spawned from increasingly quotidian classic high fantasy elements.

A different and unique inspiration.

A shared desire to create a setting influenced by the mythologies of our Middle Eastern and Latin American backgrounds led to the writing of Lost Lights, the setting isn’t just another retread of real-world cultures masquerading as fictional ones. Our setting is inspired by these backgrounds but we’ve taken the opportunity to create something we feel is new and different. We hope you do too!

Lineages – A deconstruction of what RPGs have called “race.”

Fantasy writing (both narrative and in RPGs) has long been tied up in the word race and what that means in defining characters and their backgrounds. The modern idea of “race” being the artificial social construct that it is, our main writers (of mixed heritages themselves) wanted to turn some corners with the idea and re-imagine it a bit.

A Contrast of Setting – Offering both high mythic fantasy and gas-punk renaissance-era technology.

An issue with many fantasy settings is that they’re often too “samey” – technology, social, and economic advancement are homogenous across continents and even entire worlds. Some more recent settings have attempted to diversify to counter this stagnancy, but this often results in one or both of two unfortunate outcomes: the world feels like it’s a bunch of different ones slapped together without enough interweaving reason, or we see that aforementioned standard fantasy setting with tacked-on “exotic otherness” attributed to analogues of real-world societies (see any RPG or fantasy book where the heroes hear NPCs speak of “the far lands” or “the world beyond with strange and exotic this-or-that”).

In Lost Lights, we had two major setting foci we wanted to present: a take on classic high fantasy and a take on something loosely resembling a technological renaissance.

A World without Guidance – All the gods have gone.

At Side Quest Press we also feel that a good campaign setting needs to be in a recent state of flux. If the world is too regimented, there’s not much adventure and strife for heroes to rise up in. If the world is too chaotic, there isn’t much of a setting to write at all beyond saying “there are monsters and dangers, kill stuff.” A good setting balances the two.

The name “Lost Lights” has meaning for each continent. On our high fantasy continent, the War of the Heavens between the Ahura and Daevas ended by ushering in the Age of Gloom, thousands of years of plague and famine. Society has only recently risen out of such depths as the Age of Perdition begins, and it’s up to the peoples of the land to find their fates together. On the other continent, things are a bit more recently cast askew; the gods, who had always been hands-on guides to the Church and every Hegemony citizen, have disappeared from the world entirely. With this happening, the stars and heavenly bodies themselves appear moved and muted in the night sky.

There are no longer any guiding Lights for anyone on Zoenn – they are Lost.

Now your Characters – and Players – must lead the way.

There are already over a hundred thousand words written exploring and unpacking the Lost Lights Campaign Setting, but the most important pieces have yet to be written. We will be using the modern “living world” method of campaign creation for Lost Lights, which means that you – the players and gamemasters that play in the Lost Lights setting – will shape the world and its history as you play. We’ll be taking surveys of your campaigns and implementing their events into a narrative that will inform to the next adventures and sourcebooks for the setting.

It’s important to us to write a setting where the NPCs (major and minor) feel accessible, real, and ready to interact. This means that your interactions and relationships with them should have true weight and meaning; accordingly, your characters, ideas, and stories will have the opportunity to become canon in the history of Lost Lights – you might even see them captured in beautiful works of art in later products!

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