Welcome to Riadus

Throughout the land, brave warriors fight for honor and the good of their kingdom, while devout clerics with power to heal or to kill tend to the faithful. Great sorcerers command the very fabric of reality itself, while storytellers and songsmiths tell all of the world about their tales. Ruins of ancient nations hold both treasure and peril for those brave enough to seek them out. Untold knowledge lies waiting in the abandoned tower of a long dead wizard. The secrets of the gods flutter unseen through the dreams of dragons…

Welcome to the world of Riadus, an original campaign setting for the Pathfinder 2e!

Riadus was originally conceived and designed for use with the Palladium Fantasy RPG, adapted for Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, and then Pathfinder 1st edition. Currently the campaign setting is being updated to the Pathfinder 2e Remaster rules. This is an ongoing process and new content will be published as it’s created.

The History of Riadus

Over twenty years ago, freshly introduced to the idea of role-playing games, my storyteller instinct took over and I attempted to write my own adventure for the fantasy campaign my friends and I played. The noob that I was, this adventure was little more than a hack ‘n’ slash gauntlet of monster after monster with the occasional trapped room or corridor in a nearly endless maze-like dungeon which surrounded the impossibly tall tower of the evil wizard Korgan. Not surprisingly, this adventure was widely successful as it was played in high school. After I did a little growing up, I began reworking the story.

The adventure became fleshed out to the point where it resembled something close to the “modules” published by popular game companies, and I ran it as a demo at several conventions. Between runs, I’d rework a few things, occasionally changing the system I used as the basis for the rules. The campaign started with a hybrid of the Palladium Fantasy RPG and Gamma World, but quickly became wholly Palladium Fantasy. For a few conventions I adapted it to Fantasy Hero, as I was, and always will be, a great fan of the Hero System. However, when Dungeons and Dragons was picked up by WotC, it was completely reworked to the point I liked it. Until this time I’d never considered using D&D as its rules made it too awkward to adapt to my adventure. With D&D 3.0 and 3.5, I saw a chance to develop my adventure into a rules system specifically designed for the fantasy genre without sacrificing any of the elements I’d designed myself. Fortunately the new rules allowed for easy integration of homebrew mechanics and I began to run several campaigns using my setting.

Then Paizo published their Pathfinder RPG, which appeared to have incorporated the majority of my homebrew content and even a number of the defining elements of my campaign world’s history. I have no doubt both the writers at Paizo and myself independently came up with extremely similar ideas on how to improve the D&D game. Great minds think alike, as they say. With the core rules having “fixed” all the mechanics I didn’t like and added sufficient customization options to character creation and growth, all I had to add were my custom races. It was a wonderful time to be me running adventures in my own campaign world.

More recently, Paizo published Pathfinder 2nd Edition, and even more recently “remastered” the rules to streamline everything and give better balance to classes and class feats. Even better (for my campaign world) Paizo severed their publications from the WotC OGL, and drafted their own ORC (Open RPG Creative) License which allows me to publish and share the Riadus Campaign Setting with others. While I have not yet officially published anything using this new license, I have plans to do so once I have enough content written to create a core setting book which may or may not every see print.

From Korgan’s Tower and its endless mazes to the world of Riadus and its vast and detailed history, the Riadus Campaign setting becoming ready to share with the world.