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Gears Characters

Gears Character Options

Source Guns & Gears pg. 36
Golarion is a world of fantasy, one that is incredibly vast and diverse. This means that numerous reflections of the genre, in all its permutations, can be found somewhere the world, as long as you know where to look. The Shining Kingdoms are a land of knights and chivalry similar to those imagined in the legends of King Arthur, the Saga Lands remain home to fierce vikings and time-displaced wizards, and the High Seas embody the spirit of exploration and the fearsome naval combat of the age of piracy.

Fantasy has more to offer than just knights in shining armor and wizards in tall towers. Ingenious goblins and ratfolk cobbling together technology from half a dozen different disciplines and schematics, industrious dwarves smithing intricate technological marvels, and humans meticulously assembling clockwork creatures and weapons piece by painstaking piece all have their places within the genre of fantasy and in the world of Golarion. For the automatons of the Jistka Imperium, their place in the world remains complicated. They represent the last remnants of an ancient society that mastered magic and machines in equal measure, then left them behind after the society fell as a relic of their lost nation's greatest achievement. For trick drivers and their trusty vehicle mechanics, their place might be almost anywhere, though they're unlikely to learn their craft outside of port cities like Absalom, or countries where technology grew at a steady pace alongside magic, like the continent of Arcadia or the nation of New Thassilon. Meanwhile, trapsmiths and their cogwheel snares find a home in Absalom, with its Clockwork Cathedral; in the gritty Grand Duchy of Alkenstar or their dwarven allies in Dongun Hold; or in Arcadia or New Thassilon as well.

Even characters whose classes typically represent the embodiments of classic fantasy and high magic might have a spark of technology hidden away somewhere, perhaps waiting for just the right moment to reveal the ace up their sleeves. The old wizard, his body failing but his magic strong, might choose to replace a failing heart with a clockwork organ rather than succumb to the temptation of undeath. A construct might successfully seek out a soul and life as a living creature to start anew and attain a different perspective about the world. Even an elven archer in a forest far away from any center of technology might create devices that are entirely new to their culture, such as scopes and eyewear that use the scientific power of crystals and lenses to see hidden targets and enable otherwise impossible shots. In all these cases, players should work together with their GMs to build context and story behind these ideas and ground the character in the world.

Fantasy is as broad and deep as human imagination. Let the ancestry, backgrounds, and archetypes that follow take your imagination even farther down the road of what a such a world can be.