Races and different publishers take on them
 

So here's my next issue, as the title says.

For the sake of the argument just going to look at one race, but is certainly applicable to all.

Dwarves. Go to the PRD and there is all the standard stuff for Paizo's take on the Dwarf. Now, start adding non Paizo material. Guess what, they may have a slightly different take on the Dwarf or extra information about the race.

So now I have:

Characters for Pathfinder
Races
Dwarves

Characters for Great City Campaign Setting
Races
Dwarves

Thoughts on not building them twice? or more? What I don't want is to take some content from the content market (eventually) v1. I add my stuff and then 6 months later there is a V2. Does that overwrite what I did and lose all that or do we know or am I just crazy about not wanting multiple racial values for the "same" race?

thanks.

What I have done is this; I entered the various races from Advanced Races Guide and then put other publishers' take on them as variants/subraces...

So I have the 'core' drow for instance; and then have put in several variants/subraces taken from WotC: Drow of the Underdark and Races of Eberron, Goodman Games: Complete Guide to Drow, Green Ronin: Plot and Poison - Guidebook to Drow, and Mongoose: Tome of Drow Lore. As you can see most are 3.5 versions (easily upgraded to PF) and it allows me more than a bit of variation for various drow nations. Since I largely run PF Greyhawk I have two different types of drow in Underoerth as well as a different version on one of Oerth's moons.

Don't know if that helps, but certainly one way to go about it.

As for Content Market material and it being overwritten by changes, the easiest way I know to avoid that is have multiple realms. One is basically your import/export realm and the other(s) your live realms. Import content from the market in the the first and then copy it over from there as you need to into your live realm(s). It won't totally prevent content overwrites, but should certainly minimize them.

First, names don't conflict so you can import a dwarf article and it will sit happily alongside an existing dwarf article you already have (later imports of the same or updated material will overwrite the old import though and I've had spotty results with RW leaving my edits alone in that case so be forewarned). All imported content will at least have tags that let you know the source so you should be able to keep it straight. If you ever do find yourself with multiple topics/articles with the same name I'd add suffixes to the imported ones to let me know at a glance where they came from.

If you're inputting the data yourself the same advice applies, use suffixes to separate the topics/articles from different sources.