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The Chronicles line is monthly at 64 pages, but at least two of those are map folios. Companion is 32 pages every other month, and two of those are going to be AP players guides. The APs have something around 14 pages of info; in the one you list it's eight pages of a city writeup, and six pages...

The PaizoCon magazine might give you a feel too. http://paizo.com/store/downloads/paizoFansUnited/v5748btpy88vh

It's an old chesnut of advice to a novice writer. Probably even a cliche. I can't remember who said it, but the quote is something like this: "The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction needs to be believable; reality obviously operates under no such restraints." I want to say...

In all honesty, I have never seen ogres presented as crazed mutant mountain folk ala Deliverance or The Hills Have Eyes before. Elves aren't dark, they're borderline uncanny. If you want a good view of the world, get the player's handout, er, I mean the gazetteer. The PDF's something like $13.

Depends who you ask, and those cultures span a very long period, many of them were not around at the same time. The Zulu and the Central Americans, for instance. Japan in the time of the Roman empire is largely unrecognizable to modern eyes. That said, a campaign world doesn't have to make...

I'd say one of the defining differences is the sense of otherness in Golarion. Golarion elves have less to do with Tolkien and more to do with the old tales. They're mercurial, they can be petty, their primary deity is the goddess of lust and revenge. Drow aren't a subrace but more a external...

I'm not exactly proud of it, but the likelihood of those tweaks in my game was directly proportional to how metagamey the players actions were. If they did something based solely on what one of the source books said, there was a good chance the source book was unreliable. Either wrong or not...

Like I said. When the game starts, remind the players that Elminster (and by extension any point of view character that 'Ed' uses) is an unreliable narrator. He's insane. And he lies. He lies a lot. "But... but... but Volo's Guide to Waterdeep said there was a secrete passage in this store...

I'm largely neutral about it. I am vehemently opposed to bad literary analysis, especially when it's being used as a thought terminating cliche. By reading others posts and remembering things. In your case, you've said similar things to the first paragraph in other places. The games you...

It has a few (similar) meanings, but here it can basically be seen as "Look at me! Look at me!" TV Trope's neologisms aren't useful in literary analysis since they have no generally accepted meaning outside of internet hipsterism. They're are fun to read though. Again, Elminster is a bit...

An interesting detail I noticed regarding people's opinions of Elminster in this thread and the Mary Sue one, is that it seems to vary based on preferred play style. I am not a Realsmhead. I enjoyed the setting, but I'm largely neutral about it and the characters. When I ran a FR game (about a...

It would depend on the usage, but: Poorly characterized. Overly idealized. Overly powerful. Unbelievable. Stock character. Based on the complaint I've seen most often: Deus ex machina. Ostentatious.

Then perhaps avoiding insulting jargon of a field only tangentially related to the topic at hand would be a good first step.

Not really. They're two very different things. I seem to recall it in the Realmspace guide. The conceit that the author is relating stories from a third person shows up a number of times. It a cross between a third person limited point of view and an epistolary narration. There's some...

No, it's a type of third person limited narration. Technically, the fourth wall concept only applies to theater (and by extension cinema, radioplays, and teleplays). In a novel, breaking the fourth wall would involve the character revealing that he knows he's fictional, living in a fictional...

Star Trek is an ensemble. Kirk, Spock, and Bones are all the hero. So Kirk is a Mary Sue in Generations? They're not too good. They're heroes. They're only too good compared to the soulless post-modern trash that academic literature passes off as protagonists. No, he's being used as a deus...

The problem is that once removed from fan fiction, it largely becomes meaningless jargon. It's often used in this form be cynical critics to take a typical heroic character and say the suck. I've seen Horatio Hornblower and James Bond called Mary Sues. It's usually a way of disparaging a...

I tend to buy more ebooks then dead tree books in general (gaming and fiction). In the former it's due to the fact that the PDF is easier to deal with for preparation and for reading something I'm not necessarily running and because a lot of my purchases the past year and a half are old games...

That makes perfect sense. HP loss doesn't affect your abilities until the hit that drops you to zero or below.

A Roman Legion included a company of masiffs in spiked collars and armor. They were trained for aggression and then starved before battle and released to break up formations. A number of poets, and Pliney the Elder discuss them. The Conquistadors employed dogs extensively.