Interview: "Tian Xia and Adapting Myth" with Eren Ahn
I enjoyed my interview back in September so much that I decided to do another interview! This time, I had a call with Eren Ahn, a college friend and a member of the team that made Pathfinder: Lost Omens: Tian Xia (both the world guide and character guide), the 2024 ENnie award winner for best setting.
Tian Xia aligns with a lot of the themes of this blog! It is a new setting for Pathfinder 2e, that evolves an older Pathfinder 1e setting to be less problematic and orientalist. The setting is deeply rooted in the folklore and mythos from across Asia, with a big part of the modernization effort involving bringing in more diversity of influences and authorship. This adaptation of history, folklore, and games is everything that I've been aiming to encourage with the blog, and I'm so thrilled to get to speak to one of its creators.
Without further ado, my conversation with Eren Ahn!
This interview was edited for clarity and length. This article may include affiliate links, which allows me to get a small portion of the price you pay, at no extra cost to you or the creator.
The Interview
For those–like myself–who are interested in writing for RPGs, can you talk about how you got on the team for the Tian Xia guides? How did you get involved with Paizo generally, and this project specifically?
You know that quote about opportunity being mostly luck?
I don't actually recommend my personal path because it was very passive in a way that you don't have to be. I was on Twitter before it was bought by Elon Musk, and that was where you found people to work with. Someone who knew someone who I knew sent out a twitter blast, saying that they wanted to make a list of people who identified as Asian who would be interested in writing for tabletop games, just to have the list for future projects. I sent them a Twitter DM and said who I am, here's what I know, and here's what I'd be comfortable writing about.
Then I didn't hear from them for 3 years. During COVID, I had gotten more involved in other creative circles: a lot of art, a lot of comics, and a lot of narrative stuff that weren't games. I'd written it off as a thing I tried, but which I'd just play. Then, three years after getting on this email list, I got an email out of the blue from a random email address, talking about a book they wanted to do for Pathfinder.
I thought "this is the weirdest phishing scam I've ever heard of." I'd heard of Pathfinder as the second biggest TTRPG, I'd heard of Paizo. So I googled all the names on the email, and they all were real people with real Paizo bios. So I said yes because it sounded real and interesting.
You said you wouldn't actually recommend that as a way to "break into" the TTRPG industry. What would you recommend?
My weird under-the-table advice is to just consume every type of written media you can think of to expose yourself broadly. Read games you like and games you don't like. And then write stuff. A lot of times your niche comes from your writing style and not your content.
There's really two types of jobs for game developers in the industry right now. There's your big freelance writers for D&D and Paizo. And there's a much bigger crowd of people who write more indie stuff. Sometimes, those are not even really meant to be played; they're almost poetry, they're doing interesting things with tone and game vibe. Those more experimental projects are what actually can get you an audience, and then you can get job offers for the former. You want someone to tell you that you wrote in a way that they remembered. Once you make that mark on someone, learning to write for Wizards or Paizo is comparatively easier because its less experimental.
There's a lot of names on this project. What was it like working on a team for the sourcebook? How did you ensure consistency across the book?
Basically everything was organized by the game developers. The two developers were James Case and Eleanor Ferron. Both incredibly kind, incredibly fun people. Both decided what was going to be in the books and who was going to write what for each book. We all had told them our preferences and what we were most comfortable writing and researching. But they were the people who actually made assignments.
But the real secret to communicating is that we had a discord server. Every author had to be on the discord server. Everyone was encouraged to send their milestones, and so everyone could read everyone else's works in progress.
There were like two sections of mine, where my part was dependent on theirs or vice versa, where we had to collaborate. One was a god that I was writing that had an established close relationship with a god someone else was writing, so we had a conversation to hash out the connections there. The other was another god, and someone else was writing about their main worshippers.
Mostly it was just, "I'm writing about this" and then someone else could drop a line in their section to help tie everything together. A lot of collaborating on a product like this is throwing in a single line to help make sure everything feels connected, but mostly everyone could continue on their own paths.
What was your main inspiration for your work on Tian Xia?
I wrote two gods, one monster for the bestiary, and one heritage (for those with D&D experience and not Pathfinder, a heritage is like a D&D subrace). For the two gods, I was given two gods from Pathfinder canon. A lot of Tian Xia was taking a pretty orientalist old source, and writing it to actually integrate with the broader concept of the world. So my gods were taken from what they had.
One of my gods--Daikitsu--has a clear analogue in Shintoism. I actually did not do a ton of research for her because I wanted everything to be unique enough to Pathfinder so that it would stand on its own, and any Shinto influences that it already had would carry over.
I wrote the Imugi (the monster) and the Dokkaebi (the player heritage), both of which are very Korean. For the Imugi, I focused a lot on the real fairy tales. I tried to find the unifying traits from all the myths, and then make them make sense within the fantasy world. The Imugi is a proto-dragon, a snake-like creature that really wants to be a dragon. The myths say there are multiple ways that it can turn into a dragon. When I was designing it, I started from a place of: why would a GM want to use this creature, and how can I make it interesting? I thought about it as the end of a sidequest, and the climatic moment, and how can I use the legends to support that moment?
I grew up hearing about the Dokkaebi, which are weird little goblins. So my goal there was to make something that would appeal to players, and I found that players were very eager to play a weird little goblin guy. I really wanted to bring the sense of whimsy to the Dokkaebi. A lot of my research was going through the myths and trying to find what the "weird little guy" vibes were that people might love, in a way that would make sense in a game.
What value do you think bringing in historical inspiration adds? Why not just go off of vibes or what already existed from the original version of Tian Xia?
There's always a tricky balance. I didn't want my sections to just feel like "this is Asia." We can all look up Asia. Tian Xia is Asia-inspired, but it is not Asia. It doesn't have that same context.
For the Dokkaebi heritage, it was important to me to draw from the legends. I wanted people to know what this little guy was about, without feeling like they had to go read the legends themselves to get that experience.
I think the value of establishing historical context is that we have a lot of it. There's really no reason to reinvent the wheel. There's a sense of catharsis in saying "there's this thing in the world that exists in a way that is recognizable to you." It's fun to write wholly original fantasy, but it's also cool to get to take a set of feats and say "oh yeah I recognize where that is drawing from." Using history and folklore provides that recognizability for people who want to play in that space, and it provides a way for other people to jump into it and maybe even be encouraged to learn a little more about the inspiration for what they're playing.
What’s your favorite historical tidbit that you got to integrate into the book? And how did it end up appearing as in the book?
Returning to the Imugi for a bit. One of the ways the myths said that an imugi becomes a dragon is by having a power pearl--it has a specific name I don't remember right now--for a long time, maybe 1000 years. There's also a Chinese myth about a goldfish that turns into a dragon by jumping up a waterfall; there's another god, one that I didn't write, inspired by that story also.
But honestly, I was kind of tired of the role that pearls were playing in Asian mythology. So I decided to make this a Pathfinder Imugi, not a Korean Imugi in Pathfinder--a tricky distinction to keep in your head at all times. The imugi of Tian Xia might be a little different than if you look it up online.
I decided to turn the pearl into a pearl shaped thing that turned into a koi egg, to connect to that "fish turning into a dragon" myth. At one point, my developer asked if there was a particular type of koi that it had to be. Butterfly koi are a real type of koi with really long fins, that are also called Dragon Carp. So I combined all three of these stories and made an imugi that holds onto this koi egg for 1000 years in order to become a dragon, and then the egg hatches to becomes a new imugi. That also makes sense for a world where magic is real, explaining how the imugi repopulate.

Other than PF2, which obviously you enjoy, what other RPGs do you play and particularly like?
I am always playing so many types of games. I'm in a discord server with some friends who enjoy playing random indie titles. I play a lot of weird games over the past little bit. Historically, I played a lot of D&D 5e, but I don't play that as much anymore. I am playing a lot of World of Darkness / Vampire the Masquerade 5e.
I also recommend Genesys a lot. It is really good for running weird settings that might not really work in other systems.
I've also been really enjoying Last Train to Bremen by Caro Asercion. It is a game that uses Liar's Dice as its mechanic. It is about a band that made a deal with the devil, and now the devil is coming to get them. I really like how it delivers its tone, as a book not just as a game.
The Tian Xia World Guide won an ENnie (congrats!) and in August, the Tian Xia Character Guide released. What are you working on now?
I am working on some random stuff for game jams on itch. I have a couple of projects coming out that are still under NDA, so I can't talk about them yet. And then there's some one page RPGs I need to finish formatting and actually post.
Where can we find you?
You can find all my game development stuff on Bluesky @erenahn. I'm also on Twitter @chromathesia for everything else I talk about other than games.
You can also find all my portfolio stuff at https://www.erenahn.com/, and I just moved my itch.io profile under https://erenahn.itch.io/