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In the early setting books and articles about the Golarion setting and its Great Beyond, such as the Inner Sea World Guide or The Great Beyond, one of the outer planes was called The Boneyeard, where Pharasma resides. Just now, I'm finding apparent references to it under a new name: Purgatory.

It seems listed as such in the Gamemastery Guide, under Planar Adventures, Outer Planes.

Another hint towards this is in Bestiary 2 where the "dead" Petitioners are from Purgatory, a True Neutral plane... with The Boneyeard nowhere to be found.

Similarly, The Maelstrom seems replaced by Limbo (more in line with the Planescape setting) and Axis seems to have become Utopia.

Are these synonyms? New replacing names? Or is The Boneyard within Purgatory? The other way around?

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I wouldn't be surprised if the last paragraph's questions were all true... I really like Great Wheel cosmology, but Wizards was right about one thing when they replaced it in 4e: it can damned complicated. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Oct 17, 2013 at 17:06

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It seems they are indeed more or less the same.

Sean K. Reynolds says:

See, anyone can do Utopia, Purgatory, and Limbo because those names are in the public domain. Whereas Axis, the Boneyard, and Maelstrom are Paizo's.

And to someone asking why they don't detail the public-domain planes, James Jacob says:

If we were to detail Utopia, Purgatory, and Limbo... they'd end up being exactly the same as Axis, the Boneyard, and the Maelstrom anyway.

In the product comments for the Gamemastery Guide, Vic Wertz, in answer to a similar question, says:

that section is a generic version of the Pathfinder Campaign Setting cosmology, and those names are part of what makes it generic. (You'll note that we never specifically talk about Golarion in there.)

So they are meant to be the same planes, or at least near-identical in concepts, but when mentioned in the core books, they use setting-generic names for them.

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