Rusty One Two's page

So, I may be much less familiar with the Canon than some of the others here, as I haven't been a subscriber since the beginning and I haven't seen all the material, but something about the story of Aroden occurs to me that I haven't seen mentioned in this thread.

Aroden and the others that passed the test of the starstone did so because of the starstone. The starstone was sent by the Aboleth to destroy humanity, was it not? Why would the enemy of man send this world ending event, if it could be used to become a god? BECAUSE it can't.

Aroden led humanity to great heights, and he was of course the first to become a god through contact with the starstone. But he died. Not only did he die, he died suddenly, unannounced, and without "great war in heaven" preceding his death.

The aboleth are schemers with more patience than any other race I can think of. Their weapon was disguised as a comet that struck Golarion and ushered in the age of darkness. This killed a lot of humans, but anyone who knows anything about humans knows that adversity breed heroism. And it did. And Aroden raised the starstone and became the scion of humanity and led it to great heights, but the source of his power was it's very undoing. Perhaps it was a time limit, perhaps the gift of the starstone waits for it's masters to recall it, perhaps some other condition sets it off, but giving humanity the god Aroden, and then taking him away, or more to the point, calling upon a device such as the starstone whose true nature the aboleth were aware of, betrayed humanity and left it broken. Aroden's faith died, and in just over 100 years his works have already started falling apart.

I don't know if these suppositions are correct, but I think the mystery of the rise and fall of Aroden can be understood as it relates to how he became a god and who let that happen. Aroden had 4606 years of godhood, and the others who passed the test of the starstone did so in roughly 1000 year increments after he did, and so it is unknown if their tenures will exceed his. The starstone was the aboleth's "solution" to the "humanity problem" and ultimately the effects it has wrought are negative. It started a near-cataclysm, and it led to the age of lost omens, disenfranchising the gods themselves, and bringing the true authority and power of all the gods into question amongst their worshippers. "Worship me and I will be kind to you" is now silently answered by "until you die without warning and the world starts falling apart."

I think we have yet to see the full ramifications of the doomsday device called the "starstone", I for one am always suspicious of gifts that fall from the sky and kill hundreds and thousands of people. Especially if those gifts come at the behest of creatures whose "gods" scoff at the current divinity, and wait in the depths for their empire to rise again.