As mentioned in my last post, I’m gathering research material for Echelon. I’d been planning to mine Pathfinder for material, and since I had a couple weeks off just now I figured it would be a good time. I had no real idea how much there is out there. I hit the Pathfinder Reference Document(not the d20PFSRD, the one provided by Paizo) and a few third-party supplements, or series of supplements — some are individually kind of small documents, but as a series add up to a fair bit. According to MS Word, the various aggregation files contain:

This includes classes, archetypes (in the applicable class files), and class-specific things like domains, inquisitions, vows, oaths, rage powers, and so on. The page counts are a little dodgy because I am pretty liberal with whitespace; if two archetypes take only half a page each, they’ll each get a whole page (feats and spells aren’t so liberal… though it would make it easier to count them, I’ve got about 1400 and about 2400 of them respectively). However, more telling is that I’ve got somewhat over a million words. Even if 3% of that number is a line for each game entity identifying where I found it (“Source: Pathfinder Reference Document/Advanced Race Guide”), which it wouldn’t be, and 10% of that is simply numbers, which it probably wouldn’t be, this is still slightly more than a million words of game entities. That’s a lot to collect, organize, and consistently format. And I haven’t even started on monsters yet.