#and you don't even have to harm the steel watch so you can repurpose them for yourself

[slayerdurge]

the brainrot is telling me to do an evil karlach origin play through

[monstersdownthepath]

How difficult would you say it'd be to set up a railway system on Golarion? I was thinking about trains and the logistics of that sort of thing in a fantasy setting with monsters and evil cults, which naturally made me think of Golarion - on the one hand they're really efficient at moving large volumes of goods very quickly. On the other hand Golarion has a lot of monsters (like Blights Whisperers) and evil cults who'd probably find it funny to mess up the tracks, wait, then watch as a train gets derailed. Which raises the question how common those sorts of monsters and cults would be, and whether the profit / value of trains would exceed the costs of building them, maintaining railways, keeping the tracks clear and maintained and paying protection money to certain monsters (like fire giants or dragons) to avoid them intentionally messing the tracks up.

Oh my god I don't even want to even start thinking of the logistics about that, but I've already started and uerhgh. ourgh.

errugghrgfrhh

god just, STARTING the project... the cost of hiring and supplying the armed presence to keep the pathway for the tracks clear before they're even laid down would be SO much... It'd be easier to repurpose a bunch of the main roads that already exist, since their existence in the first place implies that the most rampantly destructive monsters have been pushed back from them.

The more I look over the Bestiaries and the general terrain of the Inner Sea, the more I'm convinced that trains would work best only to and from major metropolis centers to the surrounding cities, because the further out into the wilds you go the more likely you are to run into the problem of... well, if we're being honest, a train that's moving at even a modest 30 miles an hour is a beast like no other. Made of iron and steel, a train is largely unassailable and impervious to harm... On Earth. On Golarion, there are monsters that vomit acid, spew fire, and attack from above, some more with claws and teeth that can shred steel, and hell some of them eat metal.

Then again most monsters would probably stay away if only because of the noise; the biggest danger in my mind would be some megafauna falling asleep on the tracks rather than the train itself being attacked directly. However, nature spirits and fey are already barely tolerating civilization's expansion into the wilds, how do you think they would treat giant metal rails and titanic, smog-spewing machines rumbling through their territory?

And this isn't even covering the dangers of insane cults, mad hermits, territorial tribes, and the good old-fashioned bandits that are 1 rough first encounter from figuring out the best way to rob a train. I can't see trains being widespread on Golarion; as previously mentioned, self-contained systems within various nations feels the safest. Cross-continental railways are far off.