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this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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askchapo
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Last time I looked at the halfling lore I got much more of an impression they were analogous to Jews - often travellers and merchants, but mostly dispersed across communities with very few towns or villages of their own. Varisians are much more Romani coded, being pretty much just Romani people in a magical world - travellers who are often mistrusted and find themselves on the edges of society as a result.
I admit I haven't done a deep dive. I'll take your word for it. There is a LOT of Golarion lore
Might be worth doing now with PF2e. One of Paizo's stated goals with PF2e was to unfuck the bits of lore that came from middle age white men trying to represent other people's cultures, leading to massive expansions on the Mwangi and Tian Xia (fantasy africa and far east, respectively) and changes to the European based lore.
It's not perfect, and definitely still has problematic elements (looking at you Extinction Curse), but I think the world does do a lot to show that you can have that orcs n elves, kitchen sink fantasy with material bases to the lore, it just requires a lot more context and work to avoid common tropes and cliches than is generally bothered with for a single story, which is what classic fantasy generally deals in, and D&D is almost exclusively built for. Because Pathfinder is designed to sell the world as much as the mechanics, they have a vested interest in making a more consistent and materially grounded world than most fantasy does - there are recognisable lines of materialist analysis in the rises and falls of the azlanti, taldor, and chelaxian empires, and it does a lot to emphasise local cultures with ancestral twists rather than ancestral cultures. It isn't entirely an example of non colonially influenced fantasy, but I think it does a lot to demonstrate the possibility of making it.