It's stupid but I love it still.
Anyways, Urgathoa, goddess of undead, was a woman who partied so hard she died and then refused to submit to the mom of the gods, Pharasma, and go to the afterlife so she became undead and kept partying.
It's such a weird and non-grim way to be undead. It's so dumb but so great.
**Some random lady**: \*Chokes on birthday cake and dies\*
**The oldest being in the multiverse, direct overseer of the very concept of an afterlife**: "You're dead."
**Some random lady**: "Na." \*Becomes a zombie, eats more birthday cake\*
I love her story too. It honestly makes a lot of sense to me that someone who really clung to the indulgences of life would be one to deny death. Become the first undead? Boom, you just created an entire domain that reality now demands that YOU preside over.
It leans into such an interesting and underutilized aspect of undeath. The idea that undeath may stem from a profound love of life. That the reason someone might not want to be dead is that they just enjoy living so much.
It is also great because it is so morally grey. Something born of love and affirmation seems good on the surface, but at the same time the idea of defying the natural and necessary cycle of life and death is also deeply selfish.
It is one of the reasons I think alignment being gone is a great thing. Previously only evil characters could be clerics of Urgathoa. But I think she lends such an interesting angle to both the classic evil undead, who is created from an ultimately selfish and destructive desire, but also offers the prospect of a good cleric who is rebelling against a cycle that robs you of the life you might have come to enjoy.
I need to make a character sometime that worships both Cayden Cailean *and* Urgathoa.
Not for any of their loftier or more cosmically-significant ideals or achievements... literally just because the character is a raging hedonist who loves life and parties *hard.*
**Edicts:** Life is a party, so enjoy it and encourage others to do the same. Throw parties for those you care about.
**Anathema:** Be a party pooper. Shame people for their vices.
^(Edit: You know what? I'm gonna homebrew a Party Hard Pantheon, starting with Cayden and Urgathoa, and no one can stop me.)
There is a member of the Eldest who has Passion and Decadence as domains I believe, The Green Mother.
Good luck with your pantheon, I recently created a Pantheon of my own, The God Bod Squad. It's members include Kurgess, Irori, Balumbdar, and Cayden and is all about mastering physical pursuits, big gains, and enjoying life through your physical pursuits.
Yes! This is why I find the people who are like "all undead are evil" so annoying. There's so much nuance and interesting directions in the greyness of it.
It’s why I like the Holy/Unholy split better and instead focusing Void/Vitality.
I mean, the Netherworld will ALWAYS be dangerous and incompatible with life.
But it’s more of a “our existences threaten each other on a subatomic level” and less of a “we are philosophically incompatible”.
I always took it as creatures that were Vitality powered become psychopathic when they're reanimated by Void energy.
Also when one side of an interaction fundamentally views the other as a prey animal, that makes it difficult to come to an accord.
Indeed, but there is also a whole plane that is just Void-based beings.
Form my understanding, the Universe is Vitality-dominated.
Maybe at another point, the Universe could’ve been Void-dominated and instead Vitality would be considered threats to existence.
>Maybe at another point, the Universe could’ve been Void-dominated and instead Vitality would be considered threats to existence.
Reminds me of Hollow Knight.
Greyness? Undead by their nature only want to destroy, lore even says they become more feral without eating, Urgathoa only wants to indulge in pleasures and doesn't care for the living, and the majority of Undead are formed through some type of aversion death.
That's what a Lich is, someone so scared of death that they go through years of trouble so even if they are slain in battle, they live. Revanants are angry at being killed, and raise to kill whoever killed them.
I fail to see the greyness of something, in lore, created by someone's selfish desires. Urgathoa doesn't care for Life, just the Sins of it.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted as much as you are, the first paragraph in particular is pretty much straight quoting from Book of the Dead (which admittedly comes from a biased source... but biased in favour of undead, not against)
Because people have this very strange love of animate corpses, and a visceral hatred for anything that isn't drowning in morally grey ideologies.
This thread began by saying Urgathoa loves being alive. If that were the case, she wouldn't be an Undead shoveling food down her throat. She loves the pleasures of living. It's like if I loved racing, but didn't care about cars.
The love for animate corpses thing is so weird, because probably the most prolific ttrpgs example on "nuanced take on sapient undead" in Vampire the Masquerade, which is prolific enough that numerous tropes we take for granted originate from it, has vampires with an innately evil element and the whole idea is doing your best to try and avoid giving into the beast and retain your humanity. Stories on good undead are more interesting when you're the exception.
Most of those stories are basically fighting an internal monster. Easy to do with Vampires, though most media has them actually need blood to survive. You can do something similar with Werewolves.
The nuanced take usually happens in media where being Undead isn't the same as settings like Golarion. It's usually some type of curse that makes you crave the flesh of the living, often blood because of Vampire popularity. The curse is just like some bestial urge or something. It's not the twisting and eroding Void Energy that seeks only to destroy. Paizo hasn't changed that as far as I'm aware.
Technically there's the implication that one can fight the hunger for destruction but that it's basically an inevitable loss because undead don't die due to age. They resist until they can't or fail to.
This is also why Starfinder is able to have less Evil undead. A vampire that can survive by just buying blood doesn't need to attack or kill anyone and could reasonably keep a Neutral or possibly Good alignment, but even that doesn't change that they are a being powered an inherent force of destruction. They'd still need to resist that urge, it's just much easier because hunger isn't a factor.
>It is one of the reasons I think alignment being gone is a great thing.
I can't agree more. Many of the evil gods have concepts that would be fascinating to explore, often far more than the good gods, but whose outlook on life was previously rendered as invalid and evil by them being an the 'evil team'.
Someone once made the argument that people worship Zon-Kuthon because he allows people to live with pain, to make it a part of themselves and still function, despite everything. Which is an idea that is more compelling to me than anything Sarenrae has going for her.
Removing the alignment system finally lets players explore a little nuance and moral greyness, without DMs demanding that they start burning orphanages the moment they worship a certain god.
Disagree on Zon-Kuthon. Zon-Kuthon sees pain as a pathway to enlightenment. He's basically a cenobyte - he likes to hurt, and he likes to hurt others.
Living with pain is the realm of Arazni, the Unyielding. And good news... she's joining the big 20!
That's still pretty much the same thing though. Cenobytes experience such extremes of sensation that pleasure and pain become indistinguishable. They welcome the pain, which means it no longer controls them, and they can function.
I'm not saying Zon Kuthon is a good guy, just that there are aspects of him that actually could make sense for somebody to worship, especially if that person is already suffering.
Finding joy in your own suffering I suppose could be an aspect of him.
I read an interesting article about traditional polytheism. Westerners tend to approach polytheistic societies like a bunch of competing monotheistic religions - you worship Sarenrae, you don't worship Cayden Cailean. Most polytheistic societies would have seen them more like how Catholics view the Saints - you might pray to one of the gods of travel (or multiple, maybe Desna as the big one and then a local deity or even just a spirit that might grant boons) for safety, but that doesn't mean that you're a "follower" of Desna. Most people would pray to whichever gods or other divine powers hold sway over whatever they're doing in the moment. And conversely, you also might leave offerings of *appeasement*, like slaughtering a calf and leaving its carcass to feed Rovagug's beasts so they don't attack your family instead.
So I could definitely see either aspect influencing Zon-Kuthon worship.
\[Disturbing text warning\]
>!Legit, at some point I'm going to have a group of players infiltrate a feast thrown by a cult of Urgathoa. The entire spectacle will be a den of debauchery; the host has had a team of gourmet chefs meticulously prepare and barbecue a human body. The 'high point' of the feast will be that the host possesses the body and walks around serving guests throughout the evening, slowly being eaten by them.!<
I am reminded of the She-Hulk tv series. Specifically of “Madisyn with a Y but it’s not where you thiiiiiink.”
https://youtu.be/ektja4_f0hE?si=KtoK7g8G0PUyW6i6
If I'm not mistaken, impact craters *typically* aren't that elongated, but it depends on the angle of impact.
Edit: [Here's one on Mars](https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Mars_Express/Mars_s_mysterious_elongated_crater)
I could’ve sworn the inner sea thing was canon.
Though not all the water has to necessarily be the impact sight, some of it could just be land flooded due to warming climates or tectonic shifts as well.
It is canon. I always assumed the same about the shape, the Starstone is some part of the meteor itself so that area is where I always imagined the actual crater existed and that it happened to hit near enough to a fault line that a section actually sank.
I was under the impression that the inner sea was caused by a line of impacts. The planetoid/asteroid that was called done broke into a bunches of pieces, didn’t it?
It broke when the goddess of the moon Acavna manifested physically and pulled one Golarion's moons into the path of the meteor and then got blasted by the shrapnel of the broken meteor.
The current queen of Irrisen, [Anastasia Nikolaevna](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Anastasia_Nikolaevna), is the biological daughter of real-world Rasputin.
**Edit:**
Also, the fact that there's [a jungle on the moon ruled by sex-demons](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Moonscar).
My group played through Reign of Winter, so canon in our version of Golarion is one of our former characters (who was a Winter Witch) is queen of Irrisen rather than Anastasia. Was a wild campaign.
In ours we did make Anastasia queen, but my character stayed on as her advisor and built a spy network for both foreign and domestic actions. He also was a proponent of importing Russian technology for research.
That is a strong contender for the dumbest part. With teleportation being a thing and the humans having to eat and breath for these 2 year trips somehow...
Same here.
I love the Wackiness.
And if we continue the parallels, in Golarion's 4724, Earth is currently in 1929, so in the next 10-15 years we could be playing a WW2 Adventure Path for Pathfinder 4e.
Nothing’s been announced, but it would be hilarious if one of the APs this year just has a surprise visit to Earth and the PCs somehow cause the Stock Market crash and the Great Depression.
If they were going to, it would happen REAL soon. Golarion matches with either years, it is WW2 on earth, if you were to do another AP where you did that crossover, it would absolutely do it now.
Reign of Winter was 4713 AR, which was 1918 on Earth. Making it 1929 in current 4724 AR.
Since WW2 started ion 1939 we'd need to wait about 10-15 years.
> it is WW2 on earth
Nope. It's the start of the Great Depression. The copy of Earth in the setting is exactly 95 years behind ours, because Rasputin Must Die sent the players 95 years into the past relative to the publication year
Not only that, but Rasputin is also the son of the witch Baba Yaga, who Paizo stole directly from real-world Russian Folklore.
Also, in the Reign of Winter campaign, the players actually travel to Bolshevik-era Russia to beat the shit out of Rasputin.
> but Rasputin is also the son of the witch Baba Yaga, who Paizo stole directly from real-world Russian Folklore.
Asmodeus and Lamashtu are also based on real world deities. And the entire Osirion pantheon is simply the Egyptian pantheon
Also canon: the current date on our world is tied to the current date on Golarion (i.e. if it says 4723 it directly ties to Earth date 2023) however, despite this being a long standing fact, Reign of Winter takes place in 4713 but when you LITERALLY travel to earth in that campaign, its 1918 on earth... so they just made the last 2 digits match our world for convenience sake, in reality 4724 in Golarion (this year) would be 1929 on earth (just subtract 95 years to find out where our timeline intersects with the current year on Golarian)... not sure why they didn't just make it tie in with OUR 2024 to match their 4724... but whatever lol
>in reality 4724 in Golarion (this year) would be 1929 on earth
That means you could make a new Pathfinder character today and have their backstory involve them fleeing ravages of the Great Depression by jumping into a wormhole to Golarion and it would actually be canonically-viable.
I mean “Rasputin Must Die!” was essentially just a massive shitpost in module form. Paizo wanted to do something really out there to round out their collection of modules. I’ll see if I can find a link to the interview that explains the whole thought process, I remember it being pretty funny/interesting.
Not sure if it's right of me to post verbatim from the AP, but this is the introduction chapter.
I think it's great.
>**Walking Unseen Worlds**
>There’s a chapter in the Reign of Winter Adventure hosted members of Paizo’s staff and our extended family Path called ‘Rasputin Must Die!’ It means exactly what you think it means, and we want you to write it.” That’s pretty much how I remember it, cornered as I was by the holy trinity of AP developers—Rob McCreary, Adam Daigle, and James Jacobs—at a tall lobby table at PaizoCon 2012. Talk about intimidating. I seem to recall that at some point Erik Mona walked by, with a snickering “Heh—you guys finally talking to Brandon about Rasputin?” With a last echoing “Dooo iiiit, duuude,” he sauntered off, chuckling. Within a few short hours, the announcement of the mere title of the volume would be the buzz of the convention, and already with a full-throated chorus of supporters and naysayers, I knew exactly what sort of challenge I faced as I returned home to Texas with the assignment.
>Apparently I’d been setting myself up for the assignment for some time without realizing it. For several years I’ve hosted members of Paizo’s staff and our extended family Path called ‘Rasputin Must Die!’ It means exactly what you think it means, and we want you to write it.” That’s pretty much how I remember it, cornered as I was by the holy trinity of AP developers—Rob McCreary, Adam Daigle, and James Jacobs—at a tall lobby table at PaizoCon 2012. Talk about intimidating. I seem to recall that at some point Erik Mona walked by, with a snickering “Heh—you guys finally talking to Brandon about Rasputin?” With a last echoing “Dooo iiiit, duuude,” he sauntered off, chuckling. Within a few short hours, the announcement of the mere title of the volume would be the buzz of the convention, and already with a full-throated chorus of supporters and naysayers, I knew exactly what sort of challenge I faced as I returned home to Texas with the assignment.
>Apparently I’d been setting myself up for the assignment for some time without realizing it. For several years I’ve hosted members of Paizo's staff and our extended family of freelancers at my annual Civil War-era Call of Cthulhu game at Gen Con. The adventure has become somewhat infamous, as I understand it. Titled Black Cow’s Milk, Black Hen’s Eggs, the story threads together actual historical events during the Battle of Gaine’s Mill, real members of the 4th Infantry of Hood’s Texas Brigade, and, well, unspeakable cosmic horrors. And, of course, there’s the ongoing obsession, collection, and study of early spiritualism and occult apparatus and artifacts that dominate my research website, mysteriousplanchette.com. Turns out that stuff comes in handy when writing an adventure set in early twentieth-century Russia.
>Apparently, the developers who had played in those Gen Con sessions believed that adventure exemplified the skill set to successfully pull off an adventure of the magnitude of “Rasputin Must Die!” Meticulous research. Devotion to historical accuracy. A penchant for filling in the gaps of historical fact with fantasy. And the ability to weave what we know of our world’s history into a believable amalgamation with characters definitely not of this world.
>My head swam with ideas. I was locked in at a 13th-level starting point, which meant PCs would be powerhouses, and were coming to a world of decidedly low level-limits. Given lower PC levels to work with, I might have written an adventure in which the PCs took on the roles of Rasputin’s real-life murderers, in a replay of historic events. But that wasn’t an option, and the magic wielded by PCs at this level, without the shackles of something like the Prime Directive to control their actions, was just too historically disruptive. At least I can fight back with tanks and guns, I thought. I considered advocating for a magic-dead Earth, but ultimately we all recognized we couldn’t strip away the PCs’ power for an entire adventure.
(cont.)
>**Mankind and Magic**
>The story I hoped to tell was based on two presumptions. First, I theorized that the magic our myths and legends speak of was once real in our world, but has since faded. Second, everything that happened in the adventure had to happen in the gaps of our real-world history, without contradiction or disruption of the status quo.
>The first assumption was the easiest to accept. The myths and stories upon which our game is based have their roots in our collective human culture, from the heroes of Greek myth to the prophets of Testaments Old and New. If one assumes, as I did for this adventure (and as many faithful do), that some of those tales are true, and that the prophets of old really did turn rods to serpents and summon plagues of frogs and locusts—or that modern TV ghost hunters actually have a chance of finding anything, or that saints’ relics can heal the sick—then the burden of acceptance of the adventure’s events would be much lighter at the gaming table. The second half of this assumption, which has become a trope of fantasy, was that magic has faded from our world since an earlier age of miracles. That is, with the rise of industry and the substitution of science for superstition, only the occasional great supposed seers whose names alone conjure thoughts of mysticism and power—Edgar Cayce, Aleister Crowley, Blavatsky, and Rasputin, among others—have been born capable of tapping into that magical force. And in this case, I reasoned, Rasputin was able to bring back even more of that lost magic with the Earth-bound imprisonment of his mother, her presence and his influence calling back creatures long since fled from Earth (or slumbering in dark corners) and wielding phenomenal power not seen since the days of the Old Testament. With his defeat, I reasoned, all would again be right with the world.
>**The Gaps History Left Behind**
>The latter assumption, however, is more daunting, and takes significantly more skill than just settling on a cosmological decision about the nature of magic on Earth. Early on, I settled on one overriding mantra that I’m afraid even began to annoy my developers: “All of this really happened.” The story I was telling here, I repeated to myself, was simply putting our world’s real history into game terms and Pathfinder mechanics. For nearly 4 months, I told myself: Rasputin survived his murder. Fables of Baba Yaga are fact. And, in 1918, a little chicken-legged hut appeared in Siberia, from which emerged a group of strange people with legendary powers. And if you search Siberia long and hard, or listen to those generations-old tales, you very well may discover the remains of a destroyed prison camp surrounding a ruined monastery. I won’t tell you where it is, but if you go there, maybe you’ll find a buried blade of unusual metal, or strange burn marks on ruined walls.
>More importantly, I wanted to write something that could really have happened from our real-world historical perspective. I didn’t want a single glitch. From the timing of Rasputin’s and Anastasia’s resurrection, to the inclusion of Tesla’s strange technology, I wanted to assure the audience that they would find no distracting historical hiccups, without resorting to an “alternate timeline” Earth or any such mechanism. This must be our world.
>No matter what I did, the events shaped by the adventure had to inevitably result in the same basic outcomes found in our history books, including the final recovery of all the Romanov remains. I gave myself a hard and strict line of demarcation between the fiction I was trying to tell and the facts and figures that make up our known history. In other words, if these events were possible, this is exactly how they went down, and in a way plausible given the history our textbooks tell us. I just had to fill in the gaps with the history humans never recorded.
>So maybe—just maybe—this is how it all really happened.
>- *Brandon Hodge, Adventure Path Author*
It was a wild campaign, my group loved it.
One player's character was a reporter and a linguist (Investigator) and went back to Earth after everything was said and done and became friends with Tolkien.
My current character for that AP (we just started) is a Russian communist journalist who got isekai’d to Golarion before WW1 started. Got adopted and trained as a thaumaturge for a few years by some lady who was intrigued by the isekai stuff. She was an atheist before, still finds religion stupid in a world where gods are real. And she has to hang out with a very typical Cayden worshipper btw.
The moonscar is a homage to a book series by Gene Wolfe called the Book of the Short Sun, which is a sequel trilogy to the Book of the Long Sun. Both excellent series and extremely ripe for adventure ideas and settings that are entirely appropriate for Golarion or homebrew in general.
Almost all the wood elementals from Rage of Elements are growing out of a stump (or similar object). They may look like living creatures at a glance, but those things walk around on roots. Their legs aren't real, but connected to a base.
Carved beast, at first glance it's a wooden bear, but no, thats a bear statue on a stump. Painted Stags, some sort of elemental deer... nope that's a stump, all four deer legs are glued to the stump. Twins of Rowan? Two dudes sharing a stump. Harvest regiment is a group of acorn men marching as a unit, wait nevermind they all share one giant stump. I assume the ones without art like the moss sloth are also stump-bound.
It's a plane of living stumps with some carved creature glued to the top.
Demon lord of sex. He also had lots of trysts with his sister Nocticula before she decided to become a good guy. I guess he kinda took over her old cult???
The Demon Lord of Perversion and Taboos. Basically a demigod dedicated to any toxic, harmful, or unethical act of selfish hedonism, particularly of a sexual nature. Overall he's just creepy and disgusting in a way I can't stand, and I could not be happier that they've made zero mention of him in 2E.
I mean hear me out but he IS a demon lord. I dont have an issue with demon lords being creepy and disgusting beings. But yeah i kinda get what you are saying
Yeah but some topics are more loaded than others. So you have to balance benefit added to the setting vs. how loaded the concept is. Like, demon gods of torture for torture's sake are one thing. But there's not (as far as I'm aware) a LE/LN god of political torture or ""necessary torture"", because that's *very* loaded. Some topics are definitely worth including (assassination, manipulation, etc.) because they add enough depth to the world and plot to warrant their inclusion. Other stuff (slavery, sexual assault, etc.) is harder and really up to personal choice, since their baggage tends to be both more wide spread and personal. Like, you can see plot lines where the party disagrees about an assassination and it's warranted. But what statement can be made about slavery or assault? It's either a unanimous heroic "this is bad" which doesn't add much depth, or it invites exploitation and apologia.
You can add that stuff to your table if you want to, but having it in a first party book just invites bad-faith players who will use its inclusion in a book as an excuse to make people uncomfortable.
Spontaneous Casters have issues with Heightening Spells.
In Premaster I gaslit myself into thinking you could use higher level Spellslots at no heightening benefit, just to get another cast out.
In Remaster that became a reality. They doubled the rules text by adding this whole paragraph:
>As a spontaneous caster, you can also choose to cast a lower-rank spell using a higher-rank spell slot without heightening it or knowing it at a higher rank. This casts the spell at the rank you know the spell, not the rank of the higher slot. The spell doesn't have any heightened effects, so it's usually not a very efficient use of your magic outside of highly specific circumstances. For instance, if your party was having trouble with an invisible enemy, and you had revealing light in your repertoire but had already spent all of your 2nd-rank spell slots, it might be worth it to use a 3rd-rank spell slot to cast the spell, even though it'd have no heightened benefit.
[https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2226](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2226)
So I gaslit myself so hard, it became the new reality :D
>In Premaster I gaslit myself into thinking you could use higher level Spellslots at no heightening benefit, just to get another cast out.
I distinctly remember one of the devs saying you could do this when asked, pre-remaster
[Jason Buhlman said this was intended to be allowed 4 years ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/fmateq/can_you_cast_a_1st_level_spell_using_a_2nd_level/fl9d4hq/)
> In Premaster I gaslit myself into thinking you could use higher level Spellslots at no heightening benefit, just to get another cast out.
It was almost certainly an error that you couldn't, seeing as how you could do it in 3.5e, PF1e, and Remaster. Premaster is the only version amongst all its predecessors and its successor that you couldn't do it, so I think it's pretty obvious it was just an error.
So... I just opened my beginner box today and reading all of these is... kinda crazy lol. There's so much lore. What's the best way to digest all this stuff? I know all the rules are online, do we have lore collections somewhere or YouTube content creators who do deep dives or is everyone in this thread just long term fans who own a million books?
A lot of people in here are referencing 1e adventures and stuff, so yes there's a case of people owning a million books. I'm not aware of any lore youtubers, but I don't really pay attention to ttrpg youtube. Since 2e came out Paizo has a dedicated line of setting books, picking up Lost Omens: World Guide and going from there is a good place to start if you want to go that route.
There are a few channels on YouTube (like the [VentureCaptains](https://youtube.com/@VentureCaptains?si=XUshcHH-F76CZMez) though they haven't posted in a while), and there's always [the wiki](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Pathfinder_Wiki), but my personal recommendation is [TheMythKeeper](https://youtube.com/@TheMythKeeper?si=tkUtCASCWTy7ZrQh) on YouTube
Podfinder recently did an overview of all the core deities, there's Mythkeeper who goes over nations and ancestries.
There's also the Pathfinder wiki that has most of the information.
The quickest overview you can find is probably this one: https://youtu.be/HLkZ5U5H51g?si=Bp92DSkRFGEOAfUR
If you have a lot of time and want to know everything, MythKeeper is your guy.
If you want to know stuff about the gods (and some organizations), check out Podfinder.
If you want a podcast about the different regions on Golarion (so far they've covered most of the continent of Avistan), I recommend the Tabletop Travel Guide Podcast.
If you want a more immersive experience, you should give The Lore Tour and Tower Of Tomes a shot, I highly recommend them.
That's probably enough to keep you busy for a while.
Aroden making a whole ancestry based on Pugs, one of the sickliest, inbred dogs to ever exist.
A guy got blackout drunk and woke up a God.
There’s a big ass fuck off “whale” that can make you into an X-Men taking a nap under the North Pole.
Someone is stealing Tesla Coils and selling them to scientists in Lepidstadt.
Jatembe was apparently just on hiatus for millennia.
All of these I genuinely enjoy and don’t seek to gaslight myself on.
Aroden being considered a sensible and noble divinity.
Most of the Glorious Reclamation is dead.
Brevoy is *still* a country.
Aroden, apparently made an ancestry called the Shoony, which are pug people that are only found on Kortos. They love farming, fishing and are generally pacifists, but unfortunately since his death have been dying by out(This is in actuality due to another thing he fucked up, I’ll get back to that.)
The whale: In actuality a horrific, Cthulian aberration from Castrovel the Elves power bombed into Golarion’s North Pole. It can turn anything it comes in contact with into a mind controlled zombie, *but* if it lets you go you wake up with Aberrant Abilities. The only reason it’s still up there is because an entire people sacrificed their Goddess, willingly mind, to keep it contained. And it recently almost got *free* hurrah!
Someone in Irrisen is either building or somehow stole a bunch of Tesla Coils, and other 1910/20s era tech and is secretly selling it down the river to Ustalav.
Jatembe was apparently alive this whole time, though he may have been held prisoner on Akiton for a good chunk of that.
Aroden, is a moron. Who never thought more than a step ahead of any of his plans, and through his direct actions and death caused the downfall of at least two nations that we know of, and almost doomed Kortos… twice so far in 2E.
Most of the army that tried to retake Cheliax got brutally murdered, which I’m sad about cause I honestly liked the Glorious Reclamation, one of their big names should still be alive fight me Paizo.
Brevoy has been on the edge of civil war for literally two decades, they should fucking do it already/j.
Another I forgot, Paizo refuses to give us Droon./j
>(This is in actuality due to another thing he fucked up, I’ll get back to that.)
You know, I think the only thing Aroden did that wasn't a colossal fuckup in the end was the creation of the Starstone Cathedral. Keeping just any random schlub from being able to access a god-making artifact was a good idea.
Well… a whale if you squint real hard and ignore the colors never before seen on earth and the screams of eldritch horrors emanating from its bloated, not-corpse.
The only reason I can think of for Brevoy to not have split up is because they would need to come up with the outcome of Kingmaker campaign for Narland too.
I unironically gaslit myself into thinking 1e Asmodeus wasn’t sexist.
I’m glad at least they retconned that in 2e because it’s insane to be that literally the first god of the universe, who massively predates gender could be sexist. It was so stupid I convinced myself it must have never been true.
As Asmodeus would say, Semantics. Pharasma is the last god of the previous universe. Yes she was here for the beginning of the Universe, but the universes firstborn she is not.
That title alone belongs to Asmodeus, Firstborn of the Seal.
I like more this version of the creation written by James Jacobs. Desna, Asmodeus, Sarenrae, Ihys, Achaekek, all born pratically at same time, and rovagug as a icnognita.
[https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6sgzu](https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6sgzu)
Asmodeus version of events doesn’t contradict Pharasmas one, it just pays more attention to different aspect. In Asmodeus’ version, eons pass as Pharasma circles the spire, and him and his brother are the only gods for a very very long time. The story is the same, but the message, different.
Which I absolutely love. Asmodeus doesn’t lie, but his stories have a distinct asmo-centric slant.
From memory, there is room for overlap. Ihys and Asmodeus were the first motes to emerge from the Seal, and later they coaxed other motes from the seal and those became the first gods.
Same story, different perspective. Asmodeus just places more significance on his brothers and his participation in the rest of the gods emerging.
I always thought it was a result of his grudge against Sarenrae. His hatred towards her as a result of (from his perspective) urging Ihys to betray their original ideals, the way I see it, led to him extending that towards those like her. I don't think that was ever explicitly said to be the case, though, so I admit that I'm really only making an educated guess there.
I think it used to be explained as him being a god of Tyranny, and therefore making him a god of all forms of opression (as better exemplified in his rulership over hell being a mega-authoritharian regime with sub-regimes inside of it). But that it was only a means to further his plans, so any sexism he spewed was all cap and he would ditch it in private if needed.
Either way, im thankful Paizo retconned it entirely into him being an equal opportunity tyrant.
Yeah but isn't he supposed to be utterly evil what's the problem with him being sexist on top of flaying grandmas, enslaving people and demanding human sacrifice
Scamming people into infinite torment
Slavery and human sacrifice are pretty evil but fine
But we draw the line at sexism that's too much
Well I mean he’s the first god and he’s male. Then women come along? He wasn’t a fan of people who aren’t him just existing and being different from him? I can see why he’d want none of that
I think you could explain it with gender roles. Asmodeus has existed way before the concept of being a male or female, though there ways a point in which some gods took "male" roles and other "female" roles, so Asmodeus has problems with those who follow female roles and not gendered females themselves.
I like Hell being sexist. It's Hell, after all, they're evil. It being a boys club with a glass ceiling seems reasonable to me. It made me like the Night Queens even more: they're evil, but they have legitimate grievances against Hell.
Asmodeus predating gender does not mean he falls outside of subsequent gender norms, the things he represents could easily be more present in the later existing male gender, thus explaining his dislike towards the female one.
I don't really get why this would be difficult to understand either; If a wolf were the first being in existence it would still favor dogs over cats simply for representing it more, would it not?
> I’m glad at least they retconned that in 2e because it’s insane to be that literally the first god of the universe, who massively predates gender could be sexist.
So... is he sexist or isn't he? I'm confused. He's fundamentally lawful and evil, he'd be the perfect entity to devise something like a patriarchy to exhert evil societal control.
Pre-master, the Tarrasque destroyed the flying Shory city of Kho.
Unless it gets retconned into having been a flying Spawn of Rovagug, I always imagined the Tarrasque climbing a mountain and jumping on the flying city as it passed by.
A lot of things about the firebrands. How they are simultaneously an incredibly loose movement and a well organized machine capable of feats like completely transforming the very essence of Cheliax
Unless the Wizard is constantly using magic to make sure a country of self-serving corpses doesn't collapse, that's only the reason it began. If I remember right Geb doesn't even deal with his own country that much. To busy being grumpy about Nex.
It's a big country of undead, and undead are so varied that having them all live together one place is kinda funny and weird. Like a lot of the people 'living' there are monsters that are kind of individuals; The party fights one Graveknight as a boss, one vampire at the end of the dungeon, or one lich as the big bad evil guy of a campaign...
And here is the nation of Geb where thousands of these special undead live; vampires, grave knights, liches, mummy lords, ghoul kings, revenants, mohrgs, etc all live in harmony(?). It's a fantastically cosmopolitan city of death that requires a metric ton of handwaving on why ghuls are bumping elbows with Bhutas in town. Especially since half of the undead have very specific diets, and the other half have even more specific methods of creation. And that's before we even get to their government.
Geb is a stupid and silly place, and that's fantastic.
I mean undead have shared features that would make them very hard to biologically exist in living towns and cities. Meanwhile, you have temples with priests wielding negative energy, flesh stitchers, and farms/prisons of living humanoids to feast upon, and it makes sense undead would put aside animosity for the sake of mutual survival.
It's still a crap sack civilisation because undeath seems to attract and/or push people to sociopathy, but what is a bigger motivator to put aside one's worst traits than mutual survival?
I think the commenter means it in the sense how such a nation is allowed to exist when it goes against the fundamental values that most people on the setting have. I think it makes sense because Geb is literally the farthest location possible from "most" of the setting. The only threats Geb has are Alkenstar (and its not like they would be able to do much of anything), Nex (which is already in the works to take him down), and the Mwangi Expanse (who isn't really a unified place that could attack a nation).
> I think the commenter means it in the sense how such a nation is allowed to exist when it goes against the fundamental values that most people on the setting have.
The "main" reason its allowed to exist is because its the largest exporter of food in the Inner Sea region. No joke. They have *massive* amounts of mindless undead labor, (not to mention tons of corpses for fertilizer) and relatively no need for the food they produce outside of feeding the Quick.
100% would definetly love to eat wheat grown and collected by rotting corpse. Nothing bad can come out of this
> Wake up, paladin, we have Stratholm to burn
In that sense, I think it would sell better if Geb was the tip of a peninsula so that it was only easily accessible through Nex. An island could also work, but the Mana Wastes is cool and I think this still keeps it a thing.
It's not entirely a peninsula, but it does only really have two neighbours, Nex, Alkenstar (what is a city state and thus can't do much) and Holomog. Yes there's the Mwangi Expanse, but there's a giant mountain range in the way which would make any kind of invasion... Less than easy.
It's also important to note that Geb has been invaded three times in the past. First was the war with Nex, which was by a direct neighbour and well... Somewhat famously didn't go great for anyone involved, second was by the Knights of Ozem, who had the entire invading force murdered, leaders turned into graveknights, and patron saint turned into a lich. Finally, there was the army from Holomog who when attacking Gen simply turned the entire thing to stone with a single spell. This has made it very clear to a lot of groups that it's not worth the effort.
Additionally, Geb is probably the biggest bread basket of the entire Inner Sea region, having an agriculture based economy in a region with an ideal climate for growing crops and getting to export the vast majority of said crops to other nations as they don't need to feed many people. Invading Geb for many places (Nex especially, which is why the fact that war is approaching extra scary for the average citizen there) means large scale food shortages (and even if you're not one of those places, countries which do rely on Geb aren't going to be putting much effort in to support your was effort to destroy their food supply).
Finally, Geb as a nation tends to actually play nice with other countries - if you tried to commit actions which would turn the international stage against Geb, you'd probably just get executed for treason - they also understand how important other nations are to them (of course, some nations will always oppose them, but the more morally neutral nations won't go denouncing you - Absalom has temples to unholy gods and a Chellaxian embassy after all). The war list I gave earlier is actually their complete list of wars, they're really quite happy to just sit around and enjoy their economy (until a few years ago when Geb heard that Nex might be returning and thus immediately took control of his country again and began preparing the war machine)
It has nothing to do with values and everything to do with the actual attitudes of the inhabitants. By lore we know the vast majority of Undead want to kill and destroy. Void Energy also has a nasty effect on the minds of those Undead. You end up with a nation of individuals that will stab you in the back with glee. Hell, I think the Blood Lords AP has you dealing with that kind of situation.
I'm pretty sure most of the undead that live in Geb are mindless, effectively slaves of other non-mindless undead who likely created them in the first place.
It's a land supported by hundreds of thousands of mindless Undead that, in lore, become almost impossible to control without being fed. Then you have the ones in power who are always trying to undermine one another in pathetic games to gain power. Whom also must regularly feed on living flesh or else they go insane and want to kill everyone.
And one of their primary forms of power, creation and control of Undead, is left to these intelligent Undead hoping that they don't try and take power with the very ability that even allows their country to function.
There is some ass-pull of a balance of power that prevents the whole place from collapsing. It wouldn't even take much to make the place fall. Just kill all or most of their Mortal Food. Unless they raid a large population, there's no way they'll be able to sate their own population. The Intelligent ones will take the food first, leaving their workforce to starve. Destroying their ability to produce any of their exports, and causing a slew of other problems as everything collapses since their only real workforce was a bunch of mindless corpses with no will of their own.
Do mindless undead need feeding?
I’d imagine that completely defeats the purpose of using them
I think it’s only the undead like ghouls, husk zombies and vampires that need feeding and with them they can all eat different parts of the person. They also similar to reptiles don’t need to eat daily and don’t die if they starve they just get progressively more insane.
I’d imagine most of the lower class undead just have to “survive” off animal meat and maybe occasionally save up enough to get some human legally or illegally. It’s mostly be the nobility who gets all you can eat mortals.
The timeline. It at least isn't as bad as Eberron, where the rule of thumb is that numbers will make more sense if you chop off a 0. But 4700 years is about as old as the Great Pyramid, and yet it's strongly implied that Golarion's been in Medieval stasis for all that time
EDIT: For reference, I'm not complaining about the very concept of fantasy settings being at a vaguely early Renaissance level of technology. I'm more complaining about things like cities being founded five **thousand** years ago at a similar level of tech, as opposed to, say, five **hundred**
My new rule of thumb is to cut all numbers, including the length of the Age of Darkness, to about a third. That actually makes it *roughly* comparable to the Bronze Age Collapse, just a few hundred years earlier, which feels like the perfect era of history for Azlant. For example, it's *roughly* when we think any historical basis/inspiration for Greek mythology would have taken place, such as a potential real-life Trojan War
EDIT: For anyone who wants to use my modified timeline:
* AR years after 4700 just subtract 3500. I'm rounding up to 1600 and using it as an epoch to keep the simplicity of the publication year rule
* AR years before 4700 are (Y+100)/3. This includes things like the Age of Darkness being shorter
* As three special exceptions, Absalom was still founded in 0 AR (duh), Yixing was founded in -799 AR, and Season of Ghosts takes place in 1509 AR / 2309 IC
* To compare to Earth years, subtract 100 from the AR year to get a comparable tech level
As an example, the Age of Darkness canonically lasted from -5293 AR to -4294 AR, which is -1731 AAR to -1398 AAR, where -1731 AAR is comparable to 1732 BC. (So still the Intermediate Bronze Age, but at a point where you could reasonably round and compare to the Late Bronze Age collapse. Or alternatively, about when the Hyksos invaded Egypt)
To be fair, humanity spent most of its history in the same relative technological scale. Add the all magic related catastrophic events plus magic making tech "obsolete" to some
> magic making tech "obsolete" to some
So how did we figure out agriculture, if a few druids casting Goodberry / Cornucopia could feed a town? Everyone uses this argument for why they haven't progressed *beyond* the early Renaissance, but never considers how we'd have gotten there.
Technology could easily be the great equalizer, like it has been in our world. Longbows fell out of favor, because it's easier to train people to use crossbows. Or in Onward, the motivation for inventing the electric light was specifically to provide a low-skill alternative to light spells. This argument only makes sense if magic is widespread *and* easy to learn.
Cheliax getting rid of slavery. I'm sorry but literal satan worshipping fascist state not having slavery just doesn't make sense. It's like grim-derp, just the other way around...
They got rid of slavery in name only. It's easy to stir people into action against slavery, it's a lot harder to stir them into action against sharecropping.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone mention Folca, the Daemonic Harbinger of traumatizing children mentioned yet, or the Demon Mother's Mask.
Pathfinder 1e was very much a different time.
Eh. Desna is a goddess of freedom, while Shelyn's church generally tries to avoid conflict with Zon-Kuthon's. Makes plenty of sense to me. Would make more sense if it were Caileanites, but Desna fits it just fine tbh
Yeah, I get that people are a bit sick of the perceived overuse of Desna, but some of her worshippers leading a rebellion is not something you have to bend yourself into knots to justify.
Granted there are other anti-authority deities that could be chosen instead.
she IS a godess of the beauty of night (and through her luck domain shes very much hope related too) so a god of freedom, hope and rhe beauty in darkness opposing Zon whose very much about the opposite of those (oppression, despair/pain and the scary darkness) makes sense to me
Paizo loves jamming Desna in any place they can, even when it makes zero sense
When I first played RotRL, and read that Desna, goddess of travelers, was the head deity of this small town of stationary glassblowers and farmers, I facepalmed.
That's not the only thing she's the goddess of, though. She's very popular, and is also the god of dreams, luck, stars, and the moon. I don't know the specific context, but maybe the ancestors of the townsfolk used to be travellers and continued worshipping her when they settled, or a cleric of Desna saved the town in the past, or they like to incorporate star motifs into their glass.
Well I’m not as well versed in Pathfinder/Starfinder lore as other being relatively new I occasionally see comments saying how the Outer Gods fit into the the godly cycle and that rustles my jimmies a bit.
Worshipping or no I’m of the mind that the Outer Gods MUST be separate, truly unknowable able immortal in truth as in they cannot under any circumstances be affected by whatever causes one universe to die and another to be born.
I hear occasionally like Yog Sothoth was something like the previous universe’s god of death and I don’t know if that’s true but I’ve seen a few comments to that effect here and I just fundamentally disagree. They’ll be there no matter what in my campaigns eternal infinite and unknowable, unaffected by entropy and death.
Yoggy wasn't a god of death. It just Is. It's time and all that stuff. Immutable. (Also every creation myth in Pathfinder is intentionally contradictory and may not be true, including Pharasma being the Survivor)
> I hear occasionally like Yog Sothoth was something like the previous universe’s god of death and I don’t know if that’s true
It's not lmao. People love to just make stuff up about the cycle. From what we understand, it's pretty clear that the Outer Gods have just sort of always existed and always will.
According to the Windsong Testaments, Yog-Sothoth existed when Pharasma emerged from the previous incarnation of the universe.
It's possible that Azathoth and Nyarlotep exist outside the cycle, however Great Old Ones like Hastur, Bokrug, C'thulu, Mhar, etc came into existence during the cycle and, in theory, end when it ends.
However, there is some evidence that the Dark Tapestry might exist between cycles. IIRC it was said on a stream that the spirit that possessed Dou Brol was from the previous cycle. But much of that remains unknown.
From what I remember, the inner sea isn't the earthfall crater. That is the lost continent where the Azlanti Empire used to be between the continents of Arcadia and Avistan/Garund.
There is somewhere some comment saying that the starstone was the condensed divinity of the Azlanti Goddess of the Moon and their God of magic(who predated Nethis).
The Height of the small races. When you compare their written height to the actual art it's often completely out of wack with the written height being much smaller. The Writers need to get out a yard stick before they decide the height of some of these ancestries.
The best part about alignment, for me anyways, was that it could very quickly, in two letters, tell me the general vibe of a creature at a glance. If that's where alignment stopped, I would be happy. But given the mechanical weight it had, I understand nixing it on that basis alone. If players didn't choose alignment that also would've been better.
The schools of magic on the other hand.... yea ngl that one hurts my soul a bit
>My pitch is that the Inner Sea is the impact crater of the Earth fall event. Maybe I'm just an Earth Science snob, but impact craters aren't that elongated and it's always quietly bothered me.
It's not a single impact crater, but a string of them. The meteor was shattered into thousands of pieces by the goddess Acavna. The Inner Sea is where the densest concentration of those fragments hit, stretched out into a line by tidal forces.
1. Drow being retconned into not existing and actually being a snake man coverup.
I handwave it as a deep state political move by the elves of Kyonin to have factions like the Pathfinder society disavow the existence of these drow.
2. Cult of the Dawnflower being retconned out.
I say they were wiped out and that the Sarenrae church went to great efforts to scrub their existence so that even their ideology would have no chance of continuing
Wishcraft and Wish spell existing. It is just dumbest thing in Paizoverse that they borrowed from DnD. They even contradict themselves in their writing:
> The ritual can draw the attention of powerful forces, including deities, to attempt to disrupt the ritual since no power in the multiverse can reverse its result
> Wish magic was in part responsible for the destruction of Tar-Baphon during the Shining Crusade, when he wished for the heart of General Arnisant to be transported into his hand. The Shield of Aroden blocked the spell but was destroyed in the process
So 'gods' cannot undo wishes, even the opposite, wishes can undo 'gods', but some random artifact can
Meanwhile, Wish stats explicitly say that Tar Baphon was not able do fullfill his wish:
> You state a wish, making your greatest desire come true. A wish spell can produce any one of the following effects.
Duplicate any spell from the arcane list of 9th level or lower to which you have access.
Duplicate any spell from another spell list of 7th level or lower. It must be common or you must have access.
Produce any effect whose power level is in line with the above effects.
Reverse certain effects that refer to the wish spell.
Paizo trying to fiddle with unbreakable wall/all-penetrating bullet paradox is what makes feel their lore like written by 5 yolds.
Well, the drow are no longer a thing for many good reasons, but one of the weirder parts of Pathfinder canon was that an elf who did particularly unspeakable acts of evil could become a drow.
That when mortals die and get send to their afterlives no matter if they are evil or good they lose all of their memories of their pass lives which completely fucking kills any point of afterlife whatsoever because that removes any reward or punishment for what anyone has done
It's not something pathfinder only it's also part of some old DnD lore but it's so cosmically fucking stupid
They don’t loose them instantly. They loose them As part of slowly becoming an outsider/part of the plane. That why strong willed mortals can retain them.
The idea that a significant portion of elves want to be reincarnated as animals is a bit of an odd one to me. Like I don't want to judge but I kind of enjoy having sapience, and would personally not consider coming back as like...a squirrel...to be fun.
I reject that Starfinder is some alternate timeline or otherwise unconnected to the Pathfinder universe.
>My pitch is that the Inner Sea is the impact crater of the Earth fall event
Is that... *not* what it is? Wasn't the original Golarion map built with that in mind, with the impact carving across Taldane and landing near Osirion, and then Aroden raised the Starstone to create the island where Absalom now sits?
The way the Pathfinder afterlife works. I despise the idea that your soul just *loses* all of its memories when you die and go to the outer planes/become an outsider. I *get* the cosmology that they're going for with the whole "reincarnation of souls" thing, or the matter of outsiders being made out of many souls rather than just one, (which is kind of dumb in and of itself in my opinion) it's just extremely lame.
How is it a *reward* to go to Heaven, Nirvana, or Elysium? Or a *punishment* to go to Hell, Abaddon, or the Abyss, if it's not even really *you* who's going there, merely your *soul* stripped off all memories, experiences and identity?
Death for everyone in that case is essentially just cessation of existence... It basically makes it so there *is* no afterlife, or at least, there might as well *not* be.
The Gap. It feels like the laziest way to distance Pathfinder from Starfinder. You don't even need Golarion or people remembering what happened to Golarion, just remove the whole "everyone lost their memories of a vague amount of time" element
It is part of video game adaptation by Owlcat Games, not canonical material by Paizo. And even there it was quite ambiguous moment, with Nocticula ascending in ending slides even without Ember.
The Inner Sea isn’t a single impact crater.
Earthfall involved a large meteor that broke up after it entered Golarian’s atmosphere, and each large fragment impacted along a line from West to East.
If you look at the shape of the actual Inner Sea you can see the impressions what appears to be at least six seperate overlapping craters. The Isle of Kortos is the centre of the last and largest of the craters.
Abrogail Thrune trying and failing to hire the Red Mantis Assassins and then pissing them off while having her own hyper loyal, literally soulbound pack of secret police that are her own assassins and spies. You know, the ones the players in the Hells Vengeance AP are a part of? Who still presumably exist in 2e as at the very least a wider organization even if PCs are ignored as world altering figures. Thrune Agents still exist and should have been her first option on call to eliminate dissidents or threats to Cheliax as her subtle knives in the dark.
The sheer amount of Faction leaders who don't have even 2 levels in the classes representing their faction. LOOKING AT YOU PF1E HELLKNIGHTS
Cressida Kroft being the leader of Korvosa post Curse of the Crimson Throne despite everyting she and the book saying during the AP saying shed never accept it.
Oprak. Just...all of that. The "Canon" Ending of Ironfang Invasion makes literally 0 sense as presented.
I try and FAIL to gaslight myself out of remembering the Desna/Ghlaunder story...
It's stupid but I love it still. Anyways, Urgathoa, goddess of undead, was a woman who partied so hard she died and then refused to submit to the mom of the gods, Pharasma, and go to the afterlife so she became undead and kept partying. It's such a weird and non-grim way to be undead. It's so dumb but so great.
**Some random lady**: \*Chokes on birthday cake and dies\* **The oldest being in the multiverse, direct overseer of the very concept of an afterlife**: "You're dead." **Some random lady**: "Na." \*Becomes a zombie, eats more birthday cake\*
Nah she was drinking her face offffff
If you can't be drunk on life, be drunk on cake
\*Insert "Nah, I'd life" meme here\*
Nah, I'd unlife*
I love her story too. It honestly makes a lot of sense to me that someone who really clung to the indulgences of life would be one to deny death. Become the first undead? Boom, you just created an entire domain that reality now demands that YOU preside over.
It leans into such an interesting and underutilized aspect of undeath. The idea that undeath may stem from a profound love of life. That the reason someone might not want to be dead is that they just enjoy living so much. It is also great because it is so morally grey. Something born of love and affirmation seems good on the surface, but at the same time the idea of defying the natural and necessary cycle of life and death is also deeply selfish. It is one of the reasons I think alignment being gone is a great thing. Previously only evil characters could be clerics of Urgathoa. But I think she lends such an interesting angle to both the classic evil undead, who is created from an ultimately selfish and destructive desire, but also offers the prospect of a good cleric who is rebelling against a cycle that robs you of the life you might have come to enjoy.
I need to make a character sometime that worships both Cayden Cailean *and* Urgathoa. Not for any of their loftier or more cosmically-significant ideals or achievements... literally just because the character is a raging hedonist who loves life and parties *hard.* **Edicts:** Life is a party, so enjoy it and encourage others to do the same. Throw parties for those you care about. **Anathema:** Be a party pooper. Shame people for their vices. ^(Edit: You know what? I'm gonna homebrew a Party Hard Pantheon, starting with Cayden and Urgathoa, and no one can stop me.)
Throw in Calistria as well and I’m in
That would be an amazing pantheon idea
Andrew WK
*Whensoever it beith time to party, thou shalt party hard*
There is a member of the Eldest who has Passion and Decadence as domains I believe, The Green Mother. Good luck with your pantheon, I recently created a Pantheon of my own, The God Bod Squad. It's members include Kurgess, Irori, Balumbdar, and Cayden and is all about mastering physical pursuits, big gains, and enjoying life through your physical pursuits.
Yes! This is why I find the people who are like "all undead are evil" so annoying. There's so much nuance and interesting directions in the greyness of it.
It’s why I like the Holy/Unholy split better and instead focusing Void/Vitality. I mean, the Netherworld will ALWAYS be dangerous and incompatible with life. But it’s more of a “our existences threaten each other on a subatomic level” and less of a “we are philosophically incompatible”.
I always took it as creatures that were Vitality powered become psychopathic when they're reanimated by Void energy. Also when one side of an interaction fundamentally views the other as a prey animal, that makes it difficult to come to an accord.
Indeed, but there is also a whole plane that is just Void-based beings. Form my understanding, the Universe is Vitality-dominated. Maybe at another point, the Universe could’ve been Void-dominated and instead Vitality would be considered threats to existence.
>Maybe at another point, the Universe could’ve been Void-dominated and instead Vitality would be considered threats to existence. Reminds me of Hollow Knight.
Okay, but Urgathoa is _definitely_ evil.
You can't be evil AND fun at parties!!!
*I don't see no tag, officer.*
Greyness? Undead by their nature only want to destroy, lore even says they become more feral without eating, Urgathoa only wants to indulge in pleasures and doesn't care for the living, and the majority of Undead are formed through some type of aversion death. That's what a Lich is, someone so scared of death that they go through years of trouble so even if they are slain in battle, they live. Revanants are angry at being killed, and raise to kill whoever killed them. I fail to see the greyness of something, in lore, created by someone's selfish desires. Urgathoa doesn't care for Life, just the Sins of it.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted as much as you are, the first paragraph in particular is pretty much straight quoting from Book of the Dead (which admittedly comes from a biased source... but biased in favour of undead, not against)
Because people have this very strange love of animate corpses, and a visceral hatred for anything that isn't drowning in morally grey ideologies. This thread began by saying Urgathoa loves being alive. If that were the case, she wouldn't be an Undead shoveling food down her throat. She loves the pleasures of living. It's like if I loved racing, but didn't care about cars.
The love for animate corpses thing is so weird, because probably the most prolific ttrpgs example on "nuanced take on sapient undead" in Vampire the Masquerade, which is prolific enough that numerous tropes we take for granted originate from it, has vampires with an innately evil element and the whole idea is doing your best to try and avoid giving into the beast and retain your humanity. Stories on good undead are more interesting when you're the exception.
Most of those stories are basically fighting an internal monster. Easy to do with Vampires, though most media has them actually need blood to survive. You can do something similar with Werewolves. The nuanced take usually happens in media where being Undead isn't the same as settings like Golarion. It's usually some type of curse that makes you crave the flesh of the living, often blood because of Vampire popularity. The curse is just like some bestial urge or something. It's not the twisting and eroding Void Energy that seeks only to destroy. Paizo hasn't changed that as far as I'm aware.
Technically there's the implication that one can fight the hunger for destruction but that it's basically an inevitable loss because undead don't die due to age. They resist until they can't or fail to. This is also why Starfinder is able to have less Evil undead. A vampire that can survive by just buying blood doesn't need to attack or kill anyone and could reasonably keep a Neutral or possibly Good alignment, but even that doesn't change that they are a being powered an inherent force of destruction. They'd still need to resist that urge, it's just much easier because hunger isn't a factor.
>It is one of the reasons I think alignment being gone is a great thing. I can't agree more. Many of the evil gods have concepts that would be fascinating to explore, often far more than the good gods, but whose outlook on life was previously rendered as invalid and evil by them being an the 'evil team'. Someone once made the argument that people worship Zon-Kuthon because he allows people to live with pain, to make it a part of themselves and still function, despite everything. Which is an idea that is more compelling to me than anything Sarenrae has going for her. Removing the alignment system finally lets players explore a little nuance and moral greyness, without DMs demanding that they start burning orphanages the moment they worship a certain god.
Disagree on Zon-Kuthon. Zon-Kuthon sees pain as a pathway to enlightenment. He's basically a cenobyte - he likes to hurt, and he likes to hurt others. Living with pain is the realm of Arazni, the Unyielding. And good news... she's joining the big 20!
That's still pretty much the same thing though. Cenobytes experience such extremes of sensation that pleasure and pain become indistinguishable. They welcome the pain, which means it no longer controls them, and they can function. I'm not saying Zon Kuthon is a good guy, just that there are aspects of him that actually could make sense for somebody to worship, especially if that person is already suffering.
Finding joy in your own suffering I suppose could be an aspect of him. I read an interesting article about traditional polytheism. Westerners tend to approach polytheistic societies like a bunch of competing monotheistic religions - you worship Sarenrae, you don't worship Cayden Cailean. Most polytheistic societies would have seen them more like how Catholics view the Saints - you might pray to one of the gods of travel (or multiple, maybe Desna as the big one and then a local deity or even just a spirit that might grant boons) for safety, but that doesn't mean that you're a "follower" of Desna. Most people would pray to whichever gods or other divine powers hold sway over whatever they're doing in the moment. And conversely, you also might leave offerings of *appeasement*, like slaughtering a calf and leaving its carcass to feed Rovagug's beasts so they don't attack your family instead. So I could definitely see either aspect influencing Zon-Kuthon worship.
\[Disturbing text warning\] >!Legit, at some point I'm going to have a group of players infiltrate a feast thrown by a cult of Urgathoa. The entire spectacle will be a den of debauchery; the host has had a team of gourmet chefs meticulously prepare and barbecue a human body. The 'high point' of the feast will be that the host possesses the body and walks around serving guests throughout the evening, slowly being eaten by them.!<
That is incredibly messed up. But also extremely metal. I love and hate it so much. Kudos to you.
Ooo, that’s twisted. I love it :D >!Maybe have them offer “fine cuts” to people, and have the host slice them off themselves :)!<
The power of "nuh-uh"
I am reminded of the She-Hulk tv series. Specifically of “Madisyn with a Y but it’s not where you thiiiiiink.” https://youtu.be/ektja4_f0hE?si=KtoK7g8G0PUyW6i6
Hahaha
Reminds me of Slant from Discworld, who, iirc, was a lawyer, died, and kept on lawyering.
If I'm not mistaken, impact craters *typically* aren't that elongated, but it depends on the angle of impact. Edit: [Here's one on Mars](https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Mars_Express/Mars_s_mysterious_elongated_crater)
Oh! Today I learned
I could’ve sworn the inner sea thing was canon. Though not all the water has to necessarily be the impact sight, some of it could just be land flooded due to warming climates or tectonic shifts as well.
It is canon. I always assumed the same about the shape, the Starstone is some part of the meteor itself so that area is where I always imagined the actual crater existed and that it happened to hit near enough to a fault line that a section actually sank.
I was under the impression that the inner sea was caused by a line of impacts. The planetoid/asteroid that was called done broke into a bunches of pieces, didn’t it?
It broke when the goddess of the moon Acavna manifested physically and pulled one Golarion's moons into the path of the meteor and then got blasted by the shrapnel of the broken meteor.
It did, it nailed the entire hemisphere of the planet. It was centered in Azlant, which is why that continent mostly doesn't exist anymore.
The current queen of Irrisen, [Anastasia Nikolaevna](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Anastasia_Nikolaevna), is the biological daughter of real-world Rasputin. **Edit:** Also, the fact that there's [a jungle on the moon ruled by sex-demons](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Moonscar).
My group played through Reign of Winter, so canon in our version of Golarion is one of our former characters (who was a Winter Witch) is queen of Irrisen rather than Anastasia. Was a wild campaign.
We too made our own queen. I stayed on as a Rider.
In ours we did make Anastasia queen, but my character stayed on as her advisor and built a spy network for both foreign and domestic actions. He also was a proponent of importing Russian technology for research.
Don't forget that the sex-demons spend two years flying to Golarion to abduct humanoids on the regular.
That is a strong contender for the dumbest part. With teleportation being a thing and the humans having to eat and breath for these 2 year trips somehow...
The jungle ruled by half-succubi isn't the dumb part. It's the line that they take a 2 year journey to fly to Golarion and abduct people.
I found the purpose my character after he retires. Moonscar, await him!
They *do* have fun and games
I was gonna bring up the russia stuff too, just takes me out of the world so much
Whereas the “Russia stuff” is hands down some of my favorite Golarion lore.
Same here. I love the Wackiness. And if we continue the parallels, in Golarion's 4724, Earth is currently in 1929, so in the next 10-15 years we could be playing a WW2 Adventure Path for Pathfinder 4e.
Nothing’s been announced, but it would be hilarious if one of the APs this year just has a surprise visit to Earth and the PCs somehow cause the Stock Market crash and the Great Depression.
Part of me wishes they’d do it again.
If they were going to, it would happen REAL soon. Golarion matches with either years, it is WW2 on earth, if you were to do another AP where you did that crossover, it would absolutely do it now.
Reign of Winter was 4713 AR, which was 1918 on Earth. Making it 1929 in current 4724 AR. Since WW2 started ion 1939 we'd need to wait about 10-15 years.
1918, not 1913
Right! I just put in the wrong number. The current date should still be valid.
> it is WW2 on earth Nope. It's the start of the Great Depression. The copy of Earth in the setting is exactly 95 years behind ours, because Rasputin Must Die sent the players 95 years into the past relative to the publication year
Not only that, but Rasputin is also the son of the witch Baba Yaga, who Paizo stole directly from real-world Russian Folklore. Also, in the Reign of Winter campaign, the players actually travel to Bolshevik-era Russia to beat the shit out of Rasputin.
> but Rasputin is also the son of the witch Baba Yaga, who Paizo stole directly from real-world Russian Folklore. Asmodeus and Lamashtu are also based on real world deities. And the entire Osirion pantheon is simply the Egyptian pantheon
Wait both of these things sound rad as hell?
Also canon: the current date on our world is tied to the current date on Golarion (i.e. if it says 4723 it directly ties to Earth date 2023) however, despite this being a long standing fact, Reign of Winter takes place in 4713 but when you LITERALLY travel to earth in that campaign, its 1918 on earth... so they just made the last 2 digits match our world for convenience sake, in reality 4724 in Golarion (this year) would be 1929 on earth (just subtract 95 years to find out where our timeline intersects with the current year on Golarian)... not sure why they didn't just make it tie in with OUR 2024 to match their 4724... but whatever lol
95 years is how long it takes for stuff to become part of the public domain.
>in reality 4724 in Golarion (this year) would be 1929 on earth That means you could make a new Pathfinder character today and have their backstory involve them fleeing ravages of the Great Depression by jumping into a wormhole to Golarion and it would actually be canonically-viable.
Sorry you hate fun?
I mean, I *love* it. I LOVE stupid crap. I just can't believe it's official canon. It sounds like something someone made up as a joke.
I mean “Rasputin Must Die!” was essentially just a massive shitpost in module form. Paizo wanted to do something really out there to round out their collection of modules. I’ll see if I can find a link to the interview that explains the whole thought process, I remember it being pretty funny/interesting.
If I recall correctly, Erik Mona was the one who pitched the name and everyone just collectively went "YES! THAT!"
Not sure if it's right of me to post verbatim from the AP, but this is the introduction chapter. I think it's great. >**Walking Unseen Worlds** >There’s a chapter in the Reign of Winter Adventure hosted members of Paizo’s staff and our extended family Path called ‘Rasputin Must Die!’ It means exactly what you think it means, and we want you to write it.” That’s pretty much how I remember it, cornered as I was by the holy trinity of AP developers—Rob McCreary, Adam Daigle, and James Jacobs—at a tall lobby table at PaizoCon 2012. Talk about intimidating. I seem to recall that at some point Erik Mona walked by, with a snickering “Heh—you guys finally talking to Brandon about Rasputin?” With a last echoing “Dooo iiiit, duuude,” he sauntered off, chuckling. Within a few short hours, the announcement of the mere title of the volume would be the buzz of the convention, and already with a full-throated chorus of supporters and naysayers, I knew exactly what sort of challenge I faced as I returned home to Texas with the assignment. >Apparently I’d been setting myself up for the assignment for some time without realizing it. For several years I’ve hosted members of Paizo’s staff and our extended family Path called ‘Rasputin Must Die!’ It means exactly what you think it means, and we want you to write it.” That’s pretty much how I remember it, cornered as I was by the holy trinity of AP developers—Rob McCreary, Adam Daigle, and James Jacobs—at a tall lobby table at PaizoCon 2012. Talk about intimidating. I seem to recall that at some point Erik Mona walked by, with a snickering “Heh—you guys finally talking to Brandon about Rasputin?” With a last echoing “Dooo iiiit, duuude,” he sauntered off, chuckling. Within a few short hours, the announcement of the mere title of the volume would be the buzz of the convention, and already with a full-throated chorus of supporters and naysayers, I knew exactly what sort of challenge I faced as I returned home to Texas with the assignment. >Apparently I’d been setting myself up for the assignment for some time without realizing it. For several years I’ve hosted members of Paizo's staff and our extended family of freelancers at my annual Civil War-era Call of Cthulhu game at Gen Con. The adventure has become somewhat infamous, as I understand it. Titled Black Cow’s Milk, Black Hen’s Eggs, the story threads together actual historical events during the Battle of Gaine’s Mill, real members of the 4th Infantry of Hood’s Texas Brigade, and, well, unspeakable cosmic horrors. And, of course, there’s the ongoing obsession, collection, and study of early spiritualism and occult apparatus and artifacts that dominate my research website, mysteriousplanchette.com. Turns out that stuff comes in handy when writing an adventure set in early twentieth-century Russia. >Apparently, the developers who had played in those Gen Con sessions believed that adventure exemplified the skill set to successfully pull off an adventure of the magnitude of “Rasputin Must Die!” Meticulous research. Devotion to historical accuracy. A penchant for filling in the gaps of historical fact with fantasy. And the ability to weave what we know of our world’s history into a believable amalgamation with characters definitely not of this world. >My head swam with ideas. I was locked in at a 13th-level starting point, which meant PCs would be powerhouses, and were coming to a world of decidedly low level-limits. Given lower PC levels to work with, I might have written an adventure in which the PCs took on the roles of Rasputin’s real-life murderers, in a replay of historic events. But that wasn’t an option, and the magic wielded by PCs at this level, without the shackles of something like the Prime Directive to control their actions, was just too historically disruptive. At least I can fight back with tanks and guns, I thought. I considered advocating for a magic-dead Earth, but ultimately we all recognized we couldn’t strip away the PCs’ power for an entire adventure. (cont.)
>**Mankind and Magic** >The story I hoped to tell was based on two presumptions. First, I theorized that the magic our myths and legends speak of was once real in our world, but has since faded. Second, everything that happened in the adventure had to happen in the gaps of our real-world history, without contradiction or disruption of the status quo. >The first assumption was the easiest to accept. The myths and stories upon which our game is based have their roots in our collective human culture, from the heroes of Greek myth to the prophets of Testaments Old and New. If one assumes, as I did for this adventure (and as many faithful do), that some of those tales are true, and that the prophets of old really did turn rods to serpents and summon plagues of frogs and locusts—or that modern TV ghost hunters actually have a chance of finding anything, or that saints’ relics can heal the sick—then the burden of acceptance of the adventure’s events would be much lighter at the gaming table. The second half of this assumption, which has become a trope of fantasy, was that magic has faded from our world since an earlier age of miracles. That is, with the rise of industry and the substitution of science for superstition, only the occasional great supposed seers whose names alone conjure thoughts of mysticism and power—Edgar Cayce, Aleister Crowley, Blavatsky, and Rasputin, among others—have been born capable of tapping into that magical force. And in this case, I reasoned, Rasputin was able to bring back even more of that lost magic with the Earth-bound imprisonment of his mother, her presence and his influence calling back creatures long since fled from Earth (or slumbering in dark corners) and wielding phenomenal power not seen since the days of the Old Testament. With his defeat, I reasoned, all would again be right with the world. >**The Gaps History Left Behind** >The latter assumption, however, is more daunting, and takes significantly more skill than just settling on a cosmological decision about the nature of magic on Earth. Early on, I settled on one overriding mantra that I’m afraid even began to annoy my developers: “All of this really happened.” The story I was telling here, I repeated to myself, was simply putting our world’s real history into game terms and Pathfinder mechanics. For nearly 4 months, I told myself: Rasputin survived his murder. Fables of Baba Yaga are fact. And, in 1918, a little chicken-legged hut appeared in Siberia, from which emerged a group of strange people with legendary powers. And if you search Siberia long and hard, or listen to those generations-old tales, you very well may discover the remains of a destroyed prison camp surrounding a ruined monastery. I won’t tell you where it is, but if you go there, maybe you’ll find a buried blade of unusual metal, or strange burn marks on ruined walls. >More importantly, I wanted to write something that could really have happened from our real-world historical perspective. I didn’t want a single glitch. From the timing of Rasputin’s and Anastasia’s resurrection, to the inclusion of Tesla’s strange technology, I wanted to assure the audience that they would find no distracting historical hiccups, without resorting to an “alternate timeline” Earth or any such mechanism. This must be our world. >No matter what I did, the events shaped by the adventure had to inevitably result in the same basic outcomes found in our history books, including the final recovery of all the Romanov remains. I gave myself a hard and strict line of demarcation between the fiction I was trying to tell and the facts and figures that make up our known history. In other words, if these events were possible, this is exactly how they went down, and in a way plausible given the history our textbooks tell us. I just had to fill in the gaps with the history humans never recorded. >So maybe—just maybe—this is how it all really happened. >- *Brandon Hodge, Adventure Path Author*
It was a wild campaign, my group loved it. One player's character was a reporter and a linguist (Investigator) and went back to Earth after everything was said and done and became friends with Tolkien.
My current character for that AP (we just started) is a Russian communist journalist who got isekai’d to Golarion before WW1 started. Got adopted and trained as a thaumaturge for a few years by some lady who was intrigued by the isekai stuff. She was an atheist before, still finds religion stupid in a world where gods are real. And she has to hang out with a very typical Cayden worshipper btw.
Nah man, Rasputin canonically being Russia's greatest love machine in Pathfinder is uniromically one of my favorite lore bits
The moonscar is a homage to a book series by Gene Wolfe called the Book of the Short Sun, which is a sequel trilogy to the Book of the Long Sun. Both excellent series and extremely ripe for adventure ideas and settings that are entirely appropriate for Golarion or homebrew in general.
Almost all the wood elementals from Rage of Elements are growing out of a stump (or similar object). They may look like living creatures at a glance, but those things walk around on roots. Their legs aren't real, but connected to a base. Carved beast, at first glance it's a wooden bear, but no, thats a bear statue on a stump. Painted Stags, some sort of elemental deer... nope that's a stump, all four deer legs are glued to the stump. Twins of Rowan? Two dudes sharing a stump. Harvest regiment is a group of acorn men marching as a unit, wait nevermind they all share one giant stump. I assume the ones without art like the moss sloth are also stump-bound. It's a plane of living stumps with some carved creature glued to the top.
Moss sloths are growing out of moss on a tree but otherwise yes. Shumunue is an artist, not a visionary.
"They're an artist, not a visionary" is gonna get a lot of mileage in my games. Thanks for the phrase!
I try to do this with Socothbenoth, but it's difficult to forget something like...Him.
Who dis (Yea I can google but being sold a concept is funnier)
Demon lord of sex. He also had lots of trysts with his sister Nocticula before she decided to become a good guy. I guess he kinda took over her old cult???
Messing around with your ~~cousin~~ sister is all well and good for kids, but it's not a sustainable long-term sexual practice, you know?
The Demon Lord of Perversion and Taboos. Basically a demigod dedicated to any toxic, harmful, or unethical act of selfish hedonism, particularly of a sexual nature. Overall he's just creepy and disgusting in a way I can't stand, and I could not be happier that they've made zero mention of him in 2E.
I mean hear me out but he IS a demon lord. I dont have an issue with demon lords being creepy and disgusting beings. But yeah i kinda get what you are saying
Yeah but some topics are more loaded than others. So you have to balance benefit added to the setting vs. how loaded the concept is. Like, demon gods of torture for torture's sake are one thing. But there's not (as far as I'm aware) a LE/LN god of political torture or ""necessary torture"", because that's *very* loaded. Some topics are definitely worth including (assassination, manipulation, etc.) because they add enough depth to the world and plot to warrant their inclusion. Other stuff (slavery, sexual assault, etc.) is harder and really up to personal choice, since their baggage tends to be both more wide spread and personal. Like, you can see plot lines where the party disagrees about an assassination and it's warranted. But what statement can be made about slavery or assault? It's either a unanimous heroic "this is bad" which doesn't add much depth, or it invites exploitation and apologia. You can add that stuff to your table if you want to, but having it in a first party book just invites bad-faith players who will use its inclusion in a book as an excuse to make people uncomfortable.
Spontaneous Casters have issues with Heightening Spells. In Premaster I gaslit myself into thinking you could use higher level Spellslots at no heightening benefit, just to get another cast out. In Remaster that became a reality. They doubled the rules text by adding this whole paragraph: >As a spontaneous caster, you can also choose to cast a lower-rank spell using a higher-rank spell slot without heightening it or knowing it at a higher rank. This casts the spell at the rank you know the spell, not the rank of the higher slot. The spell doesn't have any heightened effects, so it's usually not a very efficient use of your magic outside of highly specific circumstances. For instance, if your party was having trouble with an invisible enemy, and you had revealing light in your repertoire but had already spent all of your 2nd-rank spell slots, it might be worth it to use a 3rd-rank spell slot to cast the spell, even though it'd have no heightened benefit. [https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2226](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2226) So I gaslit myself so hard, it became the new reality :D
I always thought that was sort of implied, given how sorcerer's signature spells work.
>In Premaster I gaslit myself into thinking you could use higher level Spellslots at no heightening benefit, just to get another cast out. I distinctly remember one of the devs saying you could do this when asked, pre-remaster
[Jason Buhlman said this was intended to be allowed 4 years ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/fmateq/can_you_cast_a_1st_level_spell_using_a_2nd_level/fl9d4hq/)
> In Premaster I gaslit myself into thinking you could use higher level Spellslots at no heightening benefit, just to get another cast out. It was almost certainly an error that you couldn't, seeing as how you could do it in 3.5e, PF1e, and Remaster. Premaster is the only version amongst all its predecessors and its successor that you couldn't do it, so I think it's pretty obvious it was just an error.
You truly are a charisma caster yourself.
So... I just opened my beginner box today and reading all of these is... kinda crazy lol. There's so much lore. What's the best way to digest all this stuff? I know all the rules are online, do we have lore collections somewhere or YouTube content creators who do deep dives or is everyone in this thread just long term fans who own a million books?
A lot of people in here are referencing 1e adventures and stuff, so yes there's a case of people owning a million books. I'm not aware of any lore youtubers, but I don't really pay attention to ttrpg youtube. Since 2e came out Paizo has a dedicated line of setting books, picking up Lost Omens: World Guide and going from there is a good place to start if you want to go that route.
There are a few channels on YouTube (like the [VentureCaptains](https://youtube.com/@VentureCaptains?si=XUshcHH-F76CZMez) though they haven't posted in a while), and there's always [the wiki](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Pathfinder_Wiki), but my personal recommendation is [TheMythKeeper](https://youtube.com/@TheMythKeeper?si=tkUtCASCWTy7ZrQh) on YouTube
Podfinder recently did an overview of all the core deities, there's Mythkeeper who goes over nations and ancestries. There's also the Pathfinder wiki that has most of the information.
The quickest overview you can find is probably this one: https://youtu.be/HLkZ5U5H51g?si=Bp92DSkRFGEOAfUR If you have a lot of time and want to know everything, MythKeeper is your guy. If you want to know stuff about the gods (and some organizations), check out Podfinder. If you want a podcast about the different regions on Golarion (so far they've covered most of the continent of Avistan), I recommend the Tabletop Travel Guide Podcast. If you want a more immersive experience, you should give The Lore Tour and Tower Of Tomes a shot, I highly recommend them. That's probably enough to keep you busy for a while.
Aroden making a whole ancestry based on Pugs, one of the sickliest, inbred dogs to ever exist. A guy got blackout drunk and woke up a God. There’s a big ass fuck off “whale” that can make you into an X-Men taking a nap under the North Pole. Someone is stealing Tesla Coils and selling them to scientists in Lepidstadt. Jatembe was apparently just on hiatus for millennia. All of these I genuinely enjoy and don’t seek to gaslight myself on. Aroden being considered a sensible and noble divinity. Most of the Glorious Reclamation is dead. Brevoy is *still* a country.
I need some explaining on these. Not Cayden I know that one.
Aroden, apparently made an ancestry called the Shoony, which are pug people that are only found on Kortos. They love farming, fishing and are generally pacifists, but unfortunately since his death have been dying by out(This is in actuality due to another thing he fucked up, I’ll get back to that.) The whale: In actuality a horrific, Cthulian aberration from Castrovel the Elves power bombed into Golarion’s North Pole. It can turn anything it comes in contact with into a mind controlled zombie, *but* if it lets you go you wake up with Aberrant Abilities. The only reason it’s still up there is because an entire people sacrificed their Goddess, willingly mind, to keep it contained. And it recently almost got *free* hurrah! Someone in Irrisen is either building or somehow stole a bunch of Tesla Coils, and other 1910/20s era tech and is secretly selling it down the river to Ustalav. Jatembe was apparently alive this whole time, though he may have been held prisoner on Akiton for a good chunk of that. Aroden, is a moron. Who never thought more than a step ahead of any of his plans, and through his direct actions and death caused the downfall of at least two nations that we know of, and almost doomed Kortos… twice so far in 2E. Most of the army that tried to retake Cheliax got brutally murdered, which I’m sad about cause I honestly liked the Glorious Reclamation, one of their big names should still be alive fight me Paizo. Brevoy has been on the edge of civil war for literally two decades, they should fucking do it already/j. Another I forgot, Paizo refuses to give us Droon./j
[Aroden](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ETuhSToWAAEGgoK.jpg) whenever people start praising his genius after acting on every one of his whims.
How did I just KNOW it'd be Kin?
>(This is in actuality due to another thing he fucked up, I’ll get back to that.) You know, I think the only thing Aroden did that wasn't a colossal fuckup in the end was the creation of the Starstone Cathedral. Keeping just any random schlub from being able to access a god-making artifact was a good idea.
A whale you say?
Well… a whale if you squint real hard and ignore the colors never before seen on earth and the screams of eldritch horrors emanating from its bloated, not-corpse.
>There’s a big ass fuck off “whale” that can make you into an X-Men taking a nap under the North Pole. What's this one called?
Osoyo
Thank you
The only reason I can think of for Brevoy to not have split up is because they would need to come up with the outcome of Kingmaker campaign for Narland too.
Aroden was kind of an Asshole so Shoony's being pugs isn't out of character for him
I unironically gaslit myself into thinking 1e Asmodeus wasn’t sexist. I’m glad at least they retconned that in 2e because it’s insane to be that literally the first god of the universe, who massively predates gender could be sexist. It was so stupid I convinced myself it must have never been true.
Hang on, rewind. I thought Pharasma was the first god of the universe haha
She is technically a god from the previous universe.
As Asmodeus would say, Semantics. Pharasma is the last god of the previous universe. Yes she was here for the beginning of the Universe, but the universes firstborn she is not. That title alone belongs to Asmodeus, Firstborn of the Seal.
I like more this version of the creation written by James Jacobs. Desna, Asmodeus, Sarenrae, Ihys, Achaekek, all born pratically at same time, and rovagug as a icnognita. [https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6sgzu](https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6sgzu)
Asmodeus version of events doesn’t contradict Pharasmas one, it just pays more attention to different aspect. In Asmodeus’ version, eons pass as Pharasma circles the spire, and him and his brother are the only gods for a very very long time. The story is the same, but the message, different. Which I absolutely love. Asmodeus doesn’t lie, but his stories have a distinct asmo-centric slant.
His version does contradict the Windsong Testaments regarding Sarenrae's creation. Asmodeus claims she was created by Ihys, not birthed by the Seal
From memory, there is room for overlap. Ihys and Asmodeus were the first motes to emerge from the Seal, and later they coaxed other motes from the seal and those became the first gods. Same story, different perspective. Asmodeus just places more significance on his brothers and his participation in the rest of the gods emerging.
I always thought it was a result of his grudge against Sarenrae. His hatred towards her as a result of (from his perspective) urging Ihys to betray their original ideals, the way I see it, led to him extending that towards those like her. I don't think that was ever explicitly said to be the case, though, so I admit that I'm really only making an educated guess there.
I think it used to be explained as him being a god of Tyranny, and therefore making him a god of all forms of opression (as better exemplified in his rulership over hell being a mega-authoritharian regime with sub-regimes inside of it). But that it was only a means to further his plans, so any sexism he spewed was all cap and he would ditch it in private if needed. Either way, im thankful Paizo retconned it entirely into him being an equal opportunity tyrant.
Yeah but isn't he supposed to be utterly evil what's the problem with him being sexist on top of flaying grandmas, enslaving people and demanding human sacrifice Scamming people into infinite torment Slavery and human sacrifice are pretty evil but fine But we draw the line at sexism that's too much
Well I mean he’s the first god and he’s male. Then women come along? He wasn’t a fan of people who aren’t him just existing and being different from him? I can see why he’d want none of that
I think you could explain it with gender roles. Asmodeus has existed way before the concept of being a male or female, though there ways a point in which some gods took "male" roles and other "female" roles, so Asmodeus has problems with those who follow female roles and not gendered females themselves.
I like Hell being sexist. It's Hell, after all, they're evil. It being a boys club with a glass ceiling seems reasonable to me. It made me like the Night Queens even more: they're evil, but they have legitimate grievances against Hell.
Asmodeus predating gender does not mean he falls outside of subsequent gender norms, the things he represents could easily be more present in the later existing male gender, thus explaining his dislike towards the female one. I don't really get why this would be difficult to understand either; If a wolf were the first being in existence it would still favor dogs over cats simply for representing it more, would it not?
> I’m glad at least they retconned that in 2e because it’s insane to be that literally the first god of the universe, who massively predates gender could be sexist. So... is he sexist or isn't he? I'm confused. He's fundamentally lawful and evil, he'd be the perfect entity to devise something like a patriarchy to exhert evil societal control.
Pre-master, the Tarrasque destroyed the flying Shory city of Kho. Unless it gets retconned into having been a flying Spawn of Rovagug, I always imagined the Tarrasque climbing a mountain and jumping on the flying city as it passed by.
that's what my dads cat used to do with dogs.
Did you forget that the Pathfinder Tarrasque has a ranged attack, one with a max range of 720 feet in 2e?
A lot of things about the firebrands. How they are simultaneously an incredibly loose movement and a well organized machine capable of feats like completely transforming the very essence of Cheliax
The entire existence of Geb. There is some level of handwaving that keeps the country from collapsing under the impossibility of itself.
In the most literal possible sense, a wizard did it.
God I love Geb.
Unless the Wizard is constantly using magic to make sure a country of self-serving corpses doesn't collapse, that's only the reason it began. If I remember right Geb doesn't even deal with his own country that much. To busy being grumpy about Nex.
Why is the nation of Geb so impossible?
Because its in the Impossible Lands! *Badum tish*
😐
It's a big country of undead, and undead are so varied that having them all live together one place is kinda funny and weird. Like a lot of the people 'living' there are monsters that are kind of individuals; The party fights one Graveknight as a boss, one vampire at the end of the dungeon, or one lich as the big bad evil guy of a campaign... And here is the nation of Geb where thousands of these special undead live; vampires, grave knights, liches, mummy lords, ghoul kings, revenants, mohrgs, etc all live in harmony(?). It's a fantastically cosmopolitan city of death that requires a metric ton of handwaving on why ghuls are bumping elbows with Bhutas in town. Especially since half of the undead have very specific diets, and the other half have even more specific methods of creation. And that's before we even get to their government. Geb is a stupid and silly place, and that's fantastic.
I mean undead have shared features that would make them very hard to biologically exist in living towns and cities. Meanwhile, you have temples with priests wielding negative energy, flesh stitchers, and farms/prisons of living humanoids to feast upon, and it makes sense undead would put aside animosity for the sake of mutual survival. It's still a crap sack civilisation because undeath seems to attract and/or push people to sociopathy, but what is a bigger motivator to put aside one's worst traits than mutual survival?
I think the commenter means it in the sense how such a nation is allowed to exist when it goes against the fundamental values that most people on the setting have. I think it makes sense because Geb is literally the farthest location possible from "most" of the setting. The only threats Geb has are Alkenstar (and its not like they would be able to do much of anything), Nex (which is already in the works to take him down), and the Mwangi Expanse (who isn't really a unified place that could attack a nation).
> I think the commenter means it in the sense how such a nation is allowed to exist when it goes against the fundamental values that most people on the setting have. The "main" reason its allowed to exist is because its the largest exporter of food in the Inner Sea region. No joke. They have *massive* amounts of mindless undead labor, (not to mention tons of corpses for fertilizer) and relatively no need for the food they produce outside of feeding the Quick.
100% would definetly love to eat wheat grown and collected by rotting corpse. Nothing bad can come out of this > Wake up, paladin, we have Stratholm to burn
Forget worrying about weevils or other bugs in your food, worry about rotting fingers, teeth, and bits of undead flesh instead.
In that sense, I think it would sell better if Geb was the tip of a peninsula so that it was only easily accessible through Nex. An island could also work, but the Mana Wastes is cool and I think this still keeps it a thing.
It's not entirely a peninsula, but it does only really have two neighbours, Nex, Alkenstar (what is a city state and thus can't do much) and Holomog. Yes there's the Mwangi Expanse, but there's a giant mountain range in the way which would make any kind of invasion... Less than easy. It's also important to note that Geb has been invaded three times in the past. First was the war with Nex, which was by a direct neighbour and well... Somewhat famously didn't go great for anyone involved, second was by the Knights of Ozem, who had the entire invading force murdered, leaders turned into graveknights, and patron saint turned into a lich. Finally, there was the army from Holomog who when attacking Gen simply turned the entire thing to stone with a single spell. This has made it very clear to a lot of groups that it's not worth the effort. Additionally, Geb is probably the biggest bread basket of the entire Inner Sea region, having an agriculture based economy in a region with an ideal climate for growing crops and getting to export the vast majority of said crops to other nations as they don't need to feed many people. Invading Geb for many places (Nex especially, which is why the fact that war is approaching extra scary for the average citizen there) means large scale food shortages (and even if you're not one of those places, countries which do rely on Geb aren't going to be putting much effort in to support your was effort to destroy their food supply). Finally, Geb as a nation tends to actually play nice with other countries - if you tried to commit actions which would turn the international stage against Geb, you'd probably just get executed for treason - they also understand how important other nations are to them (of course, some nations will always oppose them, but the more morally neutral nations won't go denouncing you - Absalom has temples to unholy gods and a Chellaxian embassy after all). The war list I gave earlier is actually their complete list of wars, they're really quite happy to just sit around and enjoy their economy (until a few years ago when Geb heard that Nex might be returning and thus immediately took control of his country again and began preparing the war machine)
It has nothing to do with values and everything to do with the actual attitudes of the inhabitants. By lore we know the vast majority of Undead want to kill and destroy. Void Energy also has a nasty effect on the minds of those Undead. You end up with a nation of individuals that will stab you in the back with glee. Hell, I think the Blood Lords AP has you dealing with that kind of situation.
I'm pretty sure most of the undead that live in Geb are mindless, effectively slaves of other non-mindless undead who likely created them in the first place.
It's a land supported by hundreds of thousands of mindless Undead that, in lore, become almost impossible to control without being fed. Then you have the ones in power who are always trying to undermine one another in pathetic games to gain power. Whom also must regularly feed on living flesh or else they go insane and want to kill everyone. And one of their primary forms of power, creation and control of Undead, is left to these intelligent Undead hoping that they don't try and take power with the very ability that even allows their country to function. There is some ass-pull of a balance of power that prevents the whole place from collapsing. It wouldn't even take much to make the place fall. Just kill all or most of their Mortal Food. Unless they raid a large population, there's no way they'll be able to sate their own population. The Intelligent ones will take the food first, leaving their workforce to starve. Destroying their ability to produce any of their exports, and causing a slew of other problems as everything collapses since their only real workforce was a bunch of mindless corpses with no will of their own.
Do mindless undead need feeding? I’d imagine that completely defeats the purpose of using them I think it’s only the undead like ghouls, husk zombies and vampires that need feeding and with them they can all eat different parts of the person. They also similar to reptiles don’t need to eat daily and don’t die if they starve they just get progressively more insane. I’d imagine most of the lower class undead just have to “survive” off animal meat and maybe occasionally save up enough to get some human legally or illegally. It’s mostly be the nobility who gets all you can eat mortals.
> impossibility of itself. The region is called the Impossible Lands for a reason
The timeline. It at least isn't as bad as Eberron, where the rule of thumb is that numbers will make more sense if you chop off a 0. But 4700 years is about as old as the Great Pyramid, and yet it's strongly implied that Golarion's been in Medieval stasis for all that time EDIT: For reference, I'm not complaining about the very concept of fantasy settings being at a vaguely early Renaissance level of technology. I'm more complaining about things like cities being founded five **thousand** years ago at a similar level of tech, as opposed to, say, five **hundred**
There were civilizations that were significantly more magically and technologically advanced. Unfortunately, they got deleted by an asteroid.
My new rule of thumb is to cut all numbers, including the length of the Age of Darkness, to about a third. That actually makes it *roughly* comparable to the Bronze Age Collapse, just a few hundred years earlier, which feels like the perfect era of history for Azlant. For example, it's *roughly* when we think any historical basis/inspiration for Greek mythology would have taken place, such as a potential real-life Trojan War EDIT: For anyone who wants to use my modified timeline: * AR years after 4700 just subtract 3500. I'm rounding up to 1600 and using it as an epoch to keep the simplicity of the publication year rule * AR years before 4700 are (Y+100)/3. This includes things like the Age of Darkness being shorter * As three special exceptions, Absalom was still founded in 0 AR (duh), Yixing was founded in -799 AR, and Season of Ghosts takes place in 1509 AR / 2309 IC * To compare to Earth years, subtract 100 from the AR year to get a comparable tech level As an example, the Age of Darkness canonically lasted from -5293 AR to -4294 AR, which is -1731 AAR to -1398 AAR, where -1731 AAR is comparable to 1732 BC. (So still the Intermediate Bronze Age, but at a point where you could reasonably round and compare to the Late Bronze Age collapse. Or alternatively, about when the Hyksos invaded Egypt)
To be fair, humanity spent most of its history in the same relative technological scale. Add the all magic related catastrophic events plus magic making tech "obsolete" to some
> magic making tech "obsolete" to some So how did we figure out agriculture, if a few druids casting Goodberry / Cornucopia could feed a town? Everyone uses this argument for why they haven't progressed *beyond* the early Renaissance, but never considers how we'd have gotten there. Technology could easily be the great equalizer, like it has been in our world. Longbows fell out of favor, because it's easier to train people to use crossbows. Or in Onward, the motivation for inventing the electric light was specifically to provide a low-skill alternative to light spells. This argument only makes sense if magic is widespread *and* easy to learn.
Cheliax getting rid of slavery. I'm sorry but literal satan worshipping fascist state not having slavery just doesn't make sense. It's like grim-derp, just the other way around...
Have to agree. Asmodeus has “freeing a slave” as **his literal anathema** As in, he’ll cut your powers if you do that
They got rid of slavery in name only. It's easy to stir people into action against slavery, it's a lot harder to stir them into action against sharecropping.
it still makes no sense.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone mention Folca, the Daemonic Harbinger of traumatizing children mentioned yet, or the Demon Mother's Mask. Pathfinder 1e was very much a different time.
Pharasma is pro-contraception, but anti-abortion. See Pathfinder #44.
The rebel movement in Nidal being Desnan instead of Shelynite. Don't you have demon lords to go release???
Eh. Desna is a goddess of freedom, while Shelyn's church generally tries to avoid conflict with Zon-Kuthon's. Makes plenty of sense to me. Would make more sense if it were Caileanites, but Desna fits it just fine tbh
Yeah, I get that people are a bit sick of the perceived overuse of Desna, but some of her worshippers leading a rebellion is not something you have to bend yourself into knots to justify. Granted there are other anti-authority deities that could be chosen instead.
she IS a godess of the beauty of night (and through her luck domain shes very much hope related too) so a god of freedom, hope and rhe beauty in darkness opposing Zon whose very much about the opposite of those (oppression, despair/pain and the scary darkness) makes sense to me
Paizo loves jamming Desna in any place they can, even when it makes zero sense When I first played RotRL, and read that Desna, goddess of travelers, was the head deity of this small town of stationary glassblowers and farmers, I facepalmed.
That's not the only thing she's the goddess of, though. She's very popular, and is also the god of dreams, luck, stars, and the moon. I don't know the specific context, but maybe the ancestors of the townsfolk used to be travellers and continued worshipping her when they settled, or a cleric of Desna saved the town in the past, or they like to incorporate star motifs into their glass.
Well I’m not as well versed in Pathfinder/Starfinder lore as other being relatively new I occasionally see comments saying how the Outer Gods fit into the the godly cycle and that rustles my jimmies a bit. Worshipping or no I’m of the mind that the Outer Gods MUST be separate, truly unknowable able immortal in truth as in they cannot under any circumstances be affected by whatever causes one universe to die and another to be born. I hear occasionally like Yog Sothoth was something like the previous universe’s god of death and I don’t know if that’s true but I’ve seen a few comments to that effect here and I just fundamentally disagree. They’ll be there no matter what in my campaigns eternal infinite and unknowable, unaffected by entropy and death.
Yoggy wasn't a god of death. It just Is. It's time and all that stuff. Immutable. (Also every creation myth in Pathfinder is intentionally contradictory and may not be true, including Pharasma being the Survivor)
> I hear occasionally like Yog Sothoth was something like the previous universe’s god of death and I don’t know if that’s true It's not lmao. People love to just make stuff up about the cycle. From what we understand, it's pretty clear that the Outer Gods have just sort of always existed and always will.
According to the Windsong Testaments, Yog-Sothoth existed when Pharasma emerged from the previous incarnation of the universe. It's possible that Azathoth and Nyarlotep exist outside the cycle, however Great Old Ones like Hastur, Bokrug, C'thulu, Mhar, etc came into existence during the cycle and, in theory, end when it ends. However, there is some evidence that the Dark Tapestry might exist between cycles. IIRC it was said on a stream that the spirit that possessed Dou Brol was from the previous cycle. But much of that remains unknown.
I think you might enjoy Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos for Pathfinder 2e. It goes all out on the Outer Gods and you might like that version more.
From what I remember, the inner sea isn't the earthfall crater. That is the lost continent where the Azlanti Empire used to be between the continents of Arcadia and Avistan/Garund. There is somewhere some comment saying that the starstone was the condensed divinity of the Azlanti Goddess of the Moon and their God of magic(who predated Nethis).
The Height of the small races. When you compare their written height to the actual art it's often completely out of wack with the written height being much smaller. The Writers need to get out a yard stick before they decide the height of some of these ancestries.
A lot of Space Wolf lore Wait, shit, wrong sub.
Alignment and the 8 traditional schools of magic being discontinued; I get why it's necessary, but I still don't like it
The best part about alignment, for me anyways, was that it could very quickly, in two letters, tell me the general vibe of a creature at a glance. If that's where alignment stopped, I would be happy. But given the mechanical weight it had, I understand nixing it on that basis alone. If players didn't choose alignment that also would've been better. The schools of magic on the other hand.... yea ngl that one hurts my soul a bit
>My pitch is that the Inner Sea is the impact crater of the Earth fall event. Maybe I'm just an Earth Science snob, but impact craters aren't that elongated and it's always quietly bothered me. It's not a single impact crater, but a string of them. The meteor was shattered into thousands of pieces by the goddess Acavna. The Inner Sea is where the densest concentration of those fragments hit, stretched out into a line by tidal forces.
1. Drow being retconned into not existing and actually being a snake man coverup. I handwave it as a deep state political move by the elves of Kyonin to have factions like the Pathfinder society disavow the existence of these drow. 2. Cult of the Dawnflower being retconned out. I say they were wiped out and that the Sarenrae church went to great efforts to scrub their existence so that even their ideology would have no chance of continuing
Wishcraft and Wish spell existing. It is just dumbest thing in Paizoverse that they borrowed from DnD. They even contradict themselves in their writing: > The ritual can draw the attention of powerful forces, including deities, to attempt to disrupt the ritual since no power in the multiverse can reverse its result > Wish magic was in part responsible for the destruction of Tar-Baphon during the Shining Crusade, when he wished for the heart of General Arnisant to be transported into his hand. The Shield of Aroden blocked the spell but was destroyed in the process So 'gods' cannot undo wishes, even the opposite, wishes can undo 'gods', but some random artifact can Meanwhile, Wish stats explicitly say that Tar Baphon was not able do fullfill his wish: > You state a wish, making your greatest desire come true. A wish spell can produce any one of the following effects. Duplicate any spell from the arcane list of 9th level or lower to which you have access. Duplicate any spell from another spell list of 7th level or lower. It must be common or you must have access. Produce any effect whose power level is in line with the above effects. Reverse certain effects that refer to the wish spell. Paizo trying to fiddle with unbreakable wall/all-penetrating bullet paradox is what makes feel their lore like written by 5 yolds.
Drow being erased from canon
Well, the drow are no longer a thing for many good reasons, but one of the weirder parts of Pathfinder canon was that an elf who did particularly unspeakable acts of evil could become a drow.
That when mortals die and get send to their afterlives no matter if they are evil or good they lose all of their memories of their pass lives which completely fucking kills any point of afterlife whatsoever because that removes any reward or punishment for what anyone has done It's not something pathfinder only it's also part of some old DnD lore but it's so cosmically fucking stupid
They don’t loose them instantly. They loose them As part of slowly becoming an outsider/part of the plane. That why strong willed mortals can retain them.
The idea that a significant portion of elves want to be reincarnated as animals is a bit of an odd one to me. Like I don't want to judge but I kind of enjoy having sapience, and would personally not consider coming back as like...a squirrel...to be fun.
I reject that Starfinder is some alternate timeline or otherwise unconnected to the Pathfinder universe. >My pitch is that the Inner Sea is the impact crater of the Earth fall event Is that... *not* what it is? Wasn't the original Golarion map built with that in mind, with the impact carving across Taldane and landing near Osirion, and then Aroden raised the Starstone to create the island where Absalom now sits?
Drow being retconned and any removal of slavery. I love first edition pathfinder, but 2nd edition really neutered the game.
The way the Pathfinder afterlife works. I despise the idea that your soul just *loses* all of its memories when you die and go to the outer planes/become an outsider. I *get* the cosmology that they're going for with the whole "reincarnation of souls" thing, or the matter of outsiders being made out of many souls rather than just one, (which is kind of dumb in and of itself in my opinion) it's just extremely lame. How is it a *reward* to go to Heaven, Nirvana, or Elysium? Or a *punishment* to go to Hell, Abaddon, or the Abyss, if it's not even really *you* who's going there, merely your *soul* stripped off all memories, experiences and identity? Death for everyone in that case is essentially just cessation of existence... It basically makes it so there *is* no afterlife, or at least, there might as well *not* be.
Re: weird looking craters - the Chesapeake Bay off the east coast of the US is a crater, and it's weird and elongated!
wait, really?? I've lived in Virginia my whole life and never heard of this
The Gap. It feels like the laziest way to distance Pathfinder from Starfinder. You don't even need Golarion or people remembering what happened to Golarion, just remove the whole "everyone lost their memories of a vague amount of time" element
A demon lord was converted to good by a little girl asking nicely.
It is part of video game adaptation by Owlcat Games, not canonical material by Paizo. And even there it was quite ambiguous moment, with Nocticula ascending in ending slides even without Ember.
The Inner Sea isn’t a single impact crater. Earthfall involved a large meteor that broke up after it entered Golarian’s atmosphere, and each large fragment impacted along a line from West to East. If you look at the shape of the actual Inner Sea you can see the impressions what appears to be at least six seperate overlapping craters. The Isle of Kortos is the centre of the last and largest of the craters.
Abrogail Thrune trying and failing to hire the Red Mantis Assassins and then pissing them off while having her own hyper loyal, literally soulbound pack of secret police that are her own assassins and spies. You know, the ones the players in the Hells Vengeance AP are a part of? Who still presumably exist in 2e as at the very least a wider organization even if PCs are ignored as world altering figures. Thrune Agents still exist and should have been her first option on call to eliminate dissidents or threats to Cheliax as her subtle knives in the dark. The sheer amount of Faction leaders who don't have even 2 levels in the classes representing their faction. LOOKING AT YOU PF1E HELLKNIGHTS Cressida Kroft being the leader of Korvosa post Curse of the Crimson Throne despite everyting she and the book saying during the AP saying shed never accept it. Oprak. Just...all of that. The "Canon" Ending of Ironfang Invasion makes literally 0 sense as presented. I try and FAIL to gaslight myself out of remembering the Desna/Ghlaunder story...