Paizo, $22.99, ISBN 978-1-60125-799-4
Fantasy, 2015

Ah, Chelix, the Infernal Empire.

Formerly an even larger empire, this kingdom was fractured by civil war until wily Abrogail I brokered a deal with the lord of Hell himself, Asmodeus, and became the queen that united the kingdom and transformed it into the largest bastion of Asmodean faith on Golarion.

Since then, she and a succession of rulers died under mysterious circumstances—unfortunate accidents, surely—right down to the current ruler, Abrogail II.

As one can imagine, Cheliax is a tyranny, run by strict laws that demand obedience to both the Queen and the Church of Asmodeus, although all parties involved also look for ways to bend the laws to their benefit or else they won’t be what they are. Furthermore, the Church and the Crown are not BFFs, but rather, rivals for power, and there are so many pockets of resistance that can somehow exist in a land with mind-reading cops that won’t hesitate to commit police brutality at the drop of a hat.

Therefore, a gazetteer and source book of that place would be fun, surely?

Well, let’s start with the layout of the information. I don’t know whose bright idea it is, but all the locations of interest are listed in freaking alphabetical order like this is some encyclopedia.

Cheliax is divided into six archduchies: the Heartlands, Hellcoast, Longmarch, Menador, Ravounel, and Sirmium. See? This is such a lawful place, even the gazetteer lists down the names of the archduchies in alphabetical order.

It would make perfect sense, therefore, to do like in the previous gazetteers from Paizo: describe the locations in chapters based on these archduchies. That way, the DM can get a good idea of how all the puzzle pieces fit together to give a big picture of Asmodeus’s playground on Golarion.

No, instead, there is one small map of Cheliax dividing the place into its archduchies, but the main map on the inside cover doesn’t even indicate the names and boundaries of these archduchies. As a result, the main map is a mess of too many words puked all over the page, and a DM unfamiliar with Cheliax will have to squint and locate each location mentioned in the inside pages to figure out where is where and which is which. This is all so stupid and DM-unfriendly.

On the other hand, because Cheliax is central to quite a good number of Pathfinder adventures, the official wiki for once offers a lovely, detailed entry for Cheliax that actually organizes every location by archduchies, and the entries of each location are presented in paragraphs and bullet points with far fewer broken links that one would expect from that generally useless wiki. Unlike this thing, the information on Cheliax there is ordered, easy to understand and cross refer, and neat in a way that even the pink-tinged top hell knob himself would approve.

In other words, anyone wanting to dip their toes into the infernal waters of that kingdom should save their $22.99 and just go to the wiki for the tea.

The fact that Cheliax is widely trekked, looted, and exploited by heroes in previous Pathfinder stuff also leads to another issue: the major cities such as Egorian, Kintargo, Ostenso, Westcrown, Pezzack, et cetera are detailed elsewhere. Yes, this is what this thing will ask you to do after giving a cursory TL:DR overview of these cities: go look up those other stuff and give Paizo more of your money.

Cheliax is unique in that it is the birthplace and current HQs of all but one of the main Hellknight orders. The Hellknights are people in edgy, spiky armors that may not necessarily are evil, worshipers of Asmodeus, or fans of the Crown; they just want to enforce order even if this means perpetuating genocide of “unenlightened” races or species, burning of books and artifacts considered dangerous to the current narrative, etc—on my god, the self-appointed progressive people on social media today, only with sexy muscles, instead of fat, and actual physical capabilities. Well, they sound like a fun bunch, but the descriptions of their HQs are made completely obsolete by a splatbook dedicated specially to the Hellknight orders.

So, what is this thing good for? I suppose it’s probably useful for folks that are curious about the lesser-traversed locales of Cheliax and would love to get a short summary of each place. There’s a charming gnome city full of labs and schools, sort of like Gnomewarts I guess, which is cute, for example.

The sites of interest section also feature some ground works for dungeon crawls, including the obligatory castle of a mad wizard (this time it’s a shadow of a mad wizard). Notable among these is the secret HQ to genetically engineer super humans by crossbreeding subjects with sex devils, sorry, sire devils (yes, it’s in the bestiary section, and it’s disappointingly lacking in sex-related traits for a sex devil) and grafting devil bits.

Chelix, the Infernal Empire comes out at a time when Paizo is busy chugging the woke Kool-Aid like it’s an all-you-can-guzzle soy latte cask party at their favorite Starbucks, so I suppose it makes sense that they try to tame down the infernal elements and make Cheliax less edgy than in the earlier incarnations of this line.

While I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing under other circumstances—I’ve mentioned before and I’ll say it again that earlier incarnations of Paizo can be way too edgy for the sake of being edgy that I get second hand embarrassment from encountering some of the more try-hard stuff they put into their products—this time around, it robs Cheliax of much of its distinct identity. It just comes off as another one of the 3,745 places in Golarion that is ruled by a strong girlboss YAAAASSS KWEEN, only evil.

All in all, this one is quite the unnecessary product. The details can be found in a more accessible and orderly manner on a wiki that is available for free, and the most adventure-friendly locations are already covered in greater detail in other Pathfinder products. Hence, this one is more of a one-stop overview of Cheliax that does an inferior job when compared to those products.

Oh, and let’s be real here: any location not covered in those products is likely not going to be used much by a DM anyway—further making the existence of this thing even more pointless.