Golarion

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Golarion (or at least the parts that matter) in a nutshell.

Golarion is the "main" planet in Paizo's default campaign setting for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. It's not the sum total of the setting's Material Plane like, say, Toril is, but it's where most of the action is and where you're going to be spending most of your time so it's also the nickname for what's properly known as the Pathfinder Campaign Setting. Golarion was first introduced to players as a generic OGL module named Crown of the Kobold King, released in June of 2007 under Paizo's GameMastery imprint. Two months later at Gen Con 2007, Paizo published Rise of the Runelords, the first of Pathfinder's famous Adventure Paths and the first product to bear the Pathfinder brand name; this was followed by another adventure path and a couple "Pathfinder Chronicles" supplements. When Wizards announced Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition and neglected to mention that the OGL would be replaced with a giant spiky dildo, Paizo cashed in on the confusion and announced that they would be creating a replacement RPG, based on OGL content but with a less restrictive license for its "Product Identity" and with Golarion as the default setting. Golarion is notable for ripping off fucking everything, including dime-store pulp novels, random bits of relatively modern history, earlier editions of D&D, sci-fi kitsch, and the kitchen sink. This is a transparent attempt to fill the gaping orifice left behind by the loss of the D&D's "Product Identity" as cheaply as possible, justified as a way of allowing many different campaign styles to coexist in the same setting. One notable exception is the elder gods of the Far Realm, which Paizo replaced by biting the bullet and licensing the Cthulhu Mythos from Chaosium.

The centerpiece of Golarion is the Inner Sea region, consisting of the fantasy equivalents of Western Europe, the Mediterranean Sea zone, and the northern half of Africa. Unlike most other fantasy settings, many of the cultures and civilizations of the Inner Sea region are in severe decline after the only deity which represents humans in the Great Beyond, Aroden, died a few centuries ago. To add salt to the wound, this caused a series of events which fucked up the world: the formation of a massive supernatural stationary fuckstorm that annihilated two entire nations and allowed pirates to develop their own kingdoms, the obliteration of a noble barbarian empire by a tear in the tissue of reality opened directly into the Abyss, and the prophets and diviners committing mass suicide as an prophesied golden age for mankind suddenly faded into nothing. As if this wasn't enough, the religious hysteria led the two greatest empires of the region to become balkanized devil-worshipping fantasy Nazis and decadent chucklefucks, respectively.

Nations of Golarion

Absalom

Mecca meets Sigil in the middle of the ocean. 10,000 years in Golarion's past, a fuckhuge magic space rock called the Starstone struck the planet, creating the Inner Sea in the process and destroying Azlant, home of the Glorious Azlanti Master Race. The last of the Azlanti, Aroden, lifted the stone out of the Inner Sea 5,000 years later and used its magic to become the God of Humanity in living flesh, founding the city-state of Absalom on the island where he dumped the thing to protect it from others who wanted to pull the same trick. It's still there, in the heart of the Ascendant Court, and anyone who survives the Test of the Starstone can use it to become a god too. (Thousands try every year; only three have ever succeeded, including one guy who took the test on a drunken dare and can't remember how he did it.) As everyone has a stake in keeping the number of crazy gods around to a minimum and the island is strategically located in the middle of the Inner Sea, Absalom has become the effective center of civilization in Golarion's western hemisphere, with a complete clusterfuck of races and nationalities walking the streets to wheel and deal. Other areas of note include the Cairnlands, the slightly-haunted graveyard for all the dumbasses who tried and failed to invade one of the most important places on the planet, and the Ivy District, which is where all the whores are and where everyone goes to stab each other in the back.

Alkenstar

Fuck yeah guns in your fantasy setting. Alkenstar is in the middle of a giant non-magical desert formed by a war between its magocratic neighbors, so they had to tell Medieval Stasis to shove it and learn engineering to stay relevant. Almost all of Golarion's gunpowder-based weaponry is produced by Alkenstari engineers, and they like to keep it that way so they can continue to charge out the ass for them. This is so your GM has an excuse to veto firearms. Despite what you'd expect from a desert nation that shits firearms, they're not particularly friends with Andoran, maintaining scrupulous neutrality and being situated in Golarion's equivalent of northeastern Africa.

Andoran

Fuck yeah 'Muricans. When Cheliax shat the bed, the nobles of Andoran went along with their new devil overlords in the interest of not becoming a fucking bloodbath like Galt or Cheliax itself. Andoran's burgeoning merchant class had other ideas and whipped up a revolution two years later, using Galtan philosophy (as if the American Revolution parallels weren't fucking obvious enough) to fuel the fires and inventing democratic socialism and the welfare state from whole cloth. As expected of fantasy Americans, they also practice cultural imperialism, actively exporting their radical ideology and disrupting the Inner Sea's slave trade. This makes them less than popular with the rest of the world. Their patron divinity is a celestial eagle-man.

Belkzen

Stupid dumb greenskin scum. When Golarion's dwarves took their expedition/holy war out of the Darklands, they brought the orcs with them. The dwarves eventually pushed them back into a shitty little valley in the continent's north, but not before a strong and ambitious orc warlord named Belkzen managed to capture and ransack a Dwarf Fortress that he rechristened Urgir, the closest thing to a capital city they have. Naturally, the Hold of Belkzen has since collapsed into a fuckpile of semi-nomadic tribes with friendly names like Broken Spine, Gutspear, and Murdered Child constantly wrangling with each other for territory. The current holder of Urgir, Grask Uldeth of the Empty Hand, has discovered the value of trade with less beefy races, and your average PC can walk the streets in relative safety... most of the time. Other locations of note include the Brimstone Haruspex, where orc clerics huff volcanic gas to predict the future, and the Foundry, where and I quote: "crazed orc engineers known as Steeleaters remain neutral in order to sell their bizarre siege weaponry to all sides." Green really iz da best, innit?

Brevoy

Asshole nobles struggling for dominance.

Cheliax

Motherfucking DEVIL NAZIS.

Druma

Jewish Scientologists. Contrary to expectations, not dwarven, though there is a substantial dwarven minority.

Galt

VIVE LA REVOLUTION!

Geb

Fuck yeah Lich King.

Hermea

Council of Wyrms: The Nation.

Isger

Cheliax's bottom bitch. Only notable because their flag has a barely-disguised swastika on it.

Races of Golarion

Being effectively Dungeons & Dragons 3.75, Golarion is absolutely crawling with races. Your D&D standards are here, but there's also an ever-growing array of races, from monstrous humanoids to ones lifted from real-world mythology to even homebrewed races.

The Standards

Human: Bog-standard human, following in the best D&D traditions by having different nations with different hats to wear.

Dwarf: Originated in Golarion's Underdark, migrated to the surface in the legendary "Quest for Sky" centuries ago.

Elf: One of the planet's oldest races. Buggered off through magical gateways to another planet during the worst of the Starfall disaster, then came back a few centuries ago.

Halfling: Pretty much your standard stunties, barring the fact that they're very popular slaves throughout the Inner Sea region.

Gnome: Fey who migrated to Golarion from The First World, then found out that without regular stimulation, they undergo something called "The Bleaching" which drives them mad and painfully kills them.

Half-Elf: Pretty much your standard half-elves.

Half-Orc: Extra emphasis on the "you were probably born from rape!" backstory.

Monstrous Humanoids

Goblin: Doubles down on the Chaotic Stupid aspects; love fire, really good singers, absolutely terrified of dogs, horses and writing.

Orc: Driven up from the Underdark by the dwarves, who they used to war with. Really double-down on the Always Chaotic Evil aspects.

Kobold: Pretty much the D&D iconic version.

Hobgoblin: A militaristic race descended from an experiment to magically mutate goblins into slave-soldiers to fight against the elf empire; their creators were killed, but the hobgoblins were complete, and now they don't have an off-switch.

Foreigners

Because Golarion has lots of "not!X" countries, there's both a "not!India" (Vudra) and a "not!Orient" (Dragon Empires), each of which has some fairly unique races native to it.

Kitsune: Your standard mischievous fun-loving shapeshifting fox-folk.

Nagaji: A race of serpentfolk bred as slaves by the nagas; they're quite content in their servitude.

Samsaran: Spiritually enlightened blue & white-colored humans who continuously reincarnate.

Vanara: Friendly, sage-like monkey-people.

Sci-Fantasy Races

Pathfinder's mapped out the star system that Golarion comes from, and in best pulp fantasy fashion, that means that you can play androids and aliens in this setting too.

Android: Look like humans with pale, silver-tinted skin and circuitry that lights up like science-tattoos when they use their powers. Most common in Numeria, as they are born out of "creation forges" left behind when the starship crashed.

Kasatha: Four-armed humanoids who don't remember what world they came from. Favor dual-wielding bows.

Lashunta: The natives of Golarion's equivalent of Venus; antennaed humanoids with psionic powers and extreme sexual dimorphism - men look more like dwarves, women look more like elves.

Triaxian: Pointy-eared aliens whose planet undergoes an extreme orbit, leading to centuries-long summers and winters, and thus the species is divided into "Summer Generation" and "Winter Generation" subspecies.

Real-Worlders

The least common race group, so far, these are critters taken from non-D&D fantasy sources, including several Lovecraft races and beings like the Orang-Pendek, a real-world cryptid that's basically an Indonesian Sasquatch.