Thank you for answering James, i was remembering correctly.
Now for even more interesting stuff, what happens if the soul (of a mindless animated skeleton) has already moved on enough and has joined with other souls and formed an outsider? Does the outsider feels any sort of pain or discomfort?
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Thank you for answering James, i was remembering correctly.
Now for even more interesting stuff, what happens if the soul (of a mindless animated skeleton) has already moved on enough and has joined with other souls and formed an outsider? Does the outsider feels any sort of pain or discomfort?
At that point, no, the soul's beyond sensation and doesn't have any lingering link to its mortal remains. Doesn't make animating a skeleton or zombie any less evil though.
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Hmmm. Looking at this from a different point of view, the soul moving on to forming an outsider is why even True Resurrection has a time limit?
And the tiny fragment of the victim's soul used to animate the undead is why you can't Resurrect someone whose body has been turned into even a mindless undead?
The way true resurrection interacts with souls, along with the other flavor for those spells, has always been that way in the game, more or less. Adding the judgement element and the like as flavor is something that is relatively recent.
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First off... Ow, in relation to the 'tearing off a fingernail' comment cuz I've done that and damn does it hurt. Anyone that has that happen to them should totally get a free pass to rain down vengeance upon the necromancer without any alignment danger.
Second, what about elemental/genie souls? As they're born straight from the positive energy plane like a human or a cat or an alraune, but when they die, their souls are destroyed. (So far as any lore I've seen anyway)
Do they all just bypass judgement?
Actually, on that note, what about children of pure outsiders, like Deskari? He was born to Pazuzu and an unnamed demon mother, is he also just entirely bypassing the judgement cycle before Pharasma and was just born into 'You're evil and are going to suffer in the Abyss, tough luck'? (I know he is evil, I'm asking if born outsiders ever a choice, or are they basically denied free will in that regard)
Elementals and genies are outsiders. As such, they have ALREADY technically been through judgement. Like all (non-native) outsiders, when they die, they basically just decompose or return to the fundamental matter of the outer planes/elemental planes (quintescence in the case of the outer planes, or the appropriate element on an elemental plane). They don't get judged because technically, the soul that makes them was ALREADY judged.
Goes the same for all outsiders, with the exception of those like tieflings who are native outsiders and have a soul separate from their body.
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Ok, but then when? It's stated that when a soul is judged they go to one of the Outer planes. There's no information of how a soul goes to one of the Inner planes. I mean, I can understand it if you worship an elemental lord, but there's just nowhere near enough worshippers of those to possibly populate all of the inner planes.
page 7 of "The Great Beyond" answers those questions: Elementals and most natives the Inner Sphere do not possess souls as do mortals but their core spiritual essence acts in much the same way.
My guess is that those spirits are recycled by the inner sphere directly into new Elementals or genies upon their death...
At that point, no, the soul's beyond sensation and doesn't have any lingering link to its mortal remains. Doesn't make animating a skeleton or zombie any less evil though.Thank you for answering James, i was remembering correctly.
Now for even more interesting stuff, what happens if the soul (of a mindless animated skeleton) has already moved on enough and has joined with other souls and formed an outsider? Does the outsider feels any sort of pain or discomfort?
Don't worry James, i am not trying to get away with animate dead being non evil, i am one of those who believe that raising undead is evil and it (sooner or later) turns you evil.
Anyway thank you for answering my question, i think i got an idea about a "weird" or "sick" or "broken" angel/archon that for some reason feels that pain and goes to the material plane to try and find that undead and destroy it.
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Ok, but then when? It's stated that when a soul is judged they go to one of the Outer planes. There's no information of how a soul goes to one of the Inner planes. I mean, I can understand it if you worship an elemental lord, but there's just nowhere near enough worshippers of those to possibly populate all of the inner planes.
Souls may well go to the elemental planes if they have no other strong ties to any standing religion but weren't "bad" enough to be punished.
But the elemental planes are already pretty well-stocked, and have been from the start. I suspect a lot of "recycling" goes on there, with elementals getting reincarnated or something like that.
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Ok, but then when? It's stated that when a soul is judged they go to one of the Outer planes. There's no information of how a soul goes to one of the Inner planes. I mean, I can understand it if you worship an elemental lord, but there's just nowhere near enough worshippers of those to possibly populate all of the inner planes.Souls may well go to the elemental planes if they have no other strong ties to any standing religion but weren't "bad" enough to be punished.
But the elemental planes are already pretty well-stocked, and have been from the start. I suspect a lot of "recycling" goes on there, with elementals getting reincarnated or something like that.
Interesting. How does that affect their religious structure? Mostly talking about genies or the primal dragons in this regard as elementals rarely have Int scores above 6 so don't seem much given to worship. But as the only elementally themed full god I'm aware of is Gozreh, and he only encompasses wind/water and also is more tied to nature than the elements in particular, are there some other elemental deities, full deities, for the inner planes? A genie god, or 4-5 of them, really seems to be missing now that I think of it. From a logistics standpoint, there should be more genies of any given element than there are of any single mortal species just due to the fact that the genies fill each of their elemental planes and mortal races (generally) only fill a single planet within the material plane and each tends to have several gods.
Also, I'm really curious now, what are the views on full outsiders born to their planes? Like Deskari, is it 'fair' that he was born with the chaotic and evil subtypes and never had a mortal life to choose his morality?
So... I assume folks know we actually did a big article about the souls and afterlife and all of that in the last Mummy's Mask volume; a lot of these questions are addressed there.
That said... as it works out, religion isn't as big a deal for things like genies or elementals as it is for outsiders from the outer planes. The primal dragons mostly worship Apsu or Dahak. I suspect there's a fair amount of worship of the Eldest of the First World, but also of the four elemental lords.
But yeah... there really isn't a "genie god" out there—they would mostly worship the elemental lords, but that does leave the good genies in a bit of a lurch since the good elemental lords are dead/missing/trapped. In which case deities like Sarenrae or Desna or some of the Empyreal Lords might work.
And of course, there's VERY LIKELY additional genie-friendly deities out there that we just haven't detailed yet...
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I didn't know that, I'll need to crack open the Mummy's Mask then.
I'm happy to see future genie deities though! It always felt a little strange to me, there being only 4 elemental lords, ALL of them being evil, and none of them actually being gods.
Also... why do the primal dragons, and the outer dragons for that matter, worship Apsu and Dahak? Their particular creation myth says nothing about Apsu and Tiamat creating any dragons who weren't chromatic/metallic. I just assumed the primal dragons were created by the inner planes, and the Outer Dragons were more created by the Material plane. Solar's in particular almost seem like they might've been created by the Jyoti to help protect the portals inside stars. Would go nicely with their 'We created life' hubris mentioned in the Bestiary.
I'm not a fan of symmetry in game design. I'm much more interested in designing things that aren't 100% balanced. That's why there's no evil outsider race that's analogous to angels, and why the demigods for evil outsiders are specifically tied to categories like demon lords, horsemen, and archdevils while the demigods for good outsiders are all lumped under empyreal lords.
And that's what's going on with the elemental demigods. My original intent was that at one point there were four good and four evil elemental lords and that they created balance in the elemental planes, but one day the evil ones flat out killed the good ones, and that's how it's been ever since. But since then, the idea that the good elemental lords are actually still alive but imprisoned crept into canon, more or less under my radar, so now they DO exist but are essentially out of the picture for the moment until some event lets them free. Regardless, the end result is the same—the lack of "balance" between good and evil among the elemental demigods is 100% intentional to create a more interesting environment to tell stories in.
Primal and outer dragons worship Apsu and Dahak because those are the two big (and likely ONLY) dragon deities in the setting. (Tiamat has more or less written out of Pathfinder due to her strong connections to D&D—I'm aware that she's from mythology, but D&D has done SO much with her that I wanted to do something different and get out of D&D's shadow in this regard... beyond that, the incarnation of Tiamat as a five-headed dragon is 100% D&D, and if we HAD gone with keeping Tiamat in our game, she would have had to be entirely different, and that's a shame.) And "that particular creation myth" says nothing about those dragons because we hadn't invented them yet. A fair amount of the early work we did on the setting was a bit slapdash, alas... and had we built the Apsu/Dahak creation myth today, we would have used language more like "They created all dragons" rather than "They created chromatic and metallic dragons."
That all said, we've also deliberately printed multiple conflicting creation myths on purpose, to obfuscate which one is "real." If ANY of them are real.
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Mmmk, I can understand the dragon thing, that makes sense. Though I'm curious now, if the evil elemental lords have killed the good ones, why haven't they just fully conquered the elemental planes? I understand they fight among themselves, but why isn't the entirety of the Plane of Fire under the fire elemental lord's control if there's no one to oppose her? How do Djinni deal with the evil air elemental lord as basically the only good creatures in the Inner planes?
Because the elemental planes are incredibly huge... far larger than a single demigod could control on their own. Furthermore... it's unlikely that they WANT to rule the entire realm. There's plenty more for a demigod to do with its resources and time than rule a plane. The fact that they haven't taken over is proof of all these things.
We really HAVEN'T had much of an opportunity to explore the elemental planes at all; and as such, there's a lot of unexplored mystery there still. Some day we'll get to it... but this thread is not the place I want to start pulling back that curtain. So for now it'll need to remain a mystery.
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beyond that, the incarnation of Tiamat as a five-headed dragon is 100% D&D, and if we HAD gone with keeping Tiamat in our game, she would have had to be entirely different, and that's a shame.
You're kidding right? that would be awesome!
From the wiki, there are two sides to her: a beautiful 'glistening' female or a massive sea dragon... scholars don't always buy the dragon shape part (i.e. see above wiki link, which in part says "While the Enûma Elish does not specifically state that Tiamat is a dragon, only that she gave birth to dragons and serpents among a more general list of monsters including scorpion men and merpeople, other sources containing the same myth do refer to her as a dragon.")
That wiki goes on to say that the multiheaded thing was mainly due to D&D in the 70's. Since dragon are 'her children', in a world where there's only 5 colors of evil dragons that would maybe make sense, but in a world like Golarion that's full of other types of dragons, linnorms, asian dragons etc. I wouldn't mind a return to a more ancient/fundamental massive sea dragon or beautiful naked glistening dame kinda Tiamat... in fact, I'm not exactly sure why she was made evil in the 70's D&D iteration. Does she have to be? Golarion already has an evil monster mother (Lamashtu) so perhaps Golarion's Tiamat could be a neutral even perhaps good 'monster mother' figure. (I haven't read Great Beyond in its entirety yet but upthread I saw those non-god power figures referred to as 'empyreal lords'... anyways if she's no god she could perhaps even predate them in Qlippoth kind of way, but from a neutral or good plane.)
Or evil. I'm not biased. I tend to agree with you James that evil and good don't need to be in equal numbers and that it may even make a setting more interesting. Based on my quick reading of the wiki (which doesn't tell the juicy bits of her story) she doesn't really spring to me as an all evil queen of dragons. There seems to be a more complex feminine side to her. Regardless of Paizo delving into her or not in the future I'd love to hear more about what people think in regards to what her story is.
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beyond that, the incarnation of Tiamat as a five-headed dragon is 100% D&D, and if we HAD gone with keeping Tiamat in our game, she would have had to be entirely different, and that's a shame.You're kidding right? that would be awesome!
From the wiki, there are two sides to her: a beautiful 'glistening' female or a massive sea dragon... scholars don't always buy the dragon shape part (i.e. see above wiki link, which in part says "While the Enûma Elish does not specifically state that Tiamat is a dragon, only that she gave birth to dragons and serpents among a more general list of monsters including scorpion men and merpeople, other sources containing the same myth do refer to her as a dragon.")
That wiki goes on to say that the multiheaded thing was mainly due to D&D in the 70's. Since dragon are 'her children', in a world where there's only 5 colors of evil dragons that would maybe make sense, but in a world like Golarion that's full of other types of dragons, linnorms, asian dragons etc. I wouldn't mind a return to a more ancient/fundamental massive sea dragon or beautiful naked glistening dame kinda Tiamat... in fact, I'm not exactly sure why she was made evil in the 70's D&D iteration. Does she have to be? Golarion already has an evil monster mother (Lamashtu) so perhaps Golarion's Tiamat could be a neutral even perhaps good 'monster mother' figure. (I haven't read Great Beyond in its entirety yet but upthread I saw those non-god power figures referred to as 'empyreal lords'... anyways if she's no god she could perhaps even predate them in Qlippoth kind of way, but from a neutral or good plane.)
Or evil. I'm not biased. I tend to agree with you James that evil and good don't need to be in equal numbers and that it may even make a setting more interesting. Based on my quick reading of the wiki (which doesn't tell the juicy bits of her story) she doesn't really spring to me as an all evil queen of dragons. There...
Awesome or not, that ship has sailed. We've gone with Dahak, a different deity from the same mythos as Tiamat as our evil dragon god.
Furthermore, I'd rather not "overwrite" the game's classic version of Tiamat. We can't really use the 5-headed dragon in our game, but that's not stopping anyone from doing so in their home game. For the same reasons we don't run with Demogorgon (whose name is mythological but who's entire appearance and function in the game is 100% Gygax), and call our mind-magic rules "psychic magic." This lets gamers use those incarnations from D&D traditions in their Pathfinder games without the implication that they're doing it wrong.
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I see your point. There's enough creative opportunities out there, still waiting and unexplored, without ever having to remodel the D&D classic takes on past mythologies, I agree. Fair enough...
About that... the Jyoti. Aside from its cool Sanskrit name origin (i.e. ज्योति ) did you guys create the whole concept behind them or have we seen them before in old manuals of the planes that I got rid of at the behest of my wife years back due to 'space' considerations? :) I really like the concept of the Jyoti!
Edit ref. Tiamat: still... scorpion men and merpeople? what up with that? Golarion got both... you sure she's not involved at some level? LOL
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beyond that, the incarnation of Tiamat as a five-headed dragon is 100% D&D, and if we HAD gone with keeping Tiamat in our game, she would have had to be entirely different, and that's a shame.You're kidding right? that would be awesome!
From the wiki, there are two sides to her: a beautiful 'glistening' female or a massive sea dragon... scholars don't always buy the dragon shape part (i.e. see above wiki link, which in part says "While the Enûma Elish does not specifically state that Tiamat is a dragon, only that she gave birth to dragons and serpents among a more general list of monsters including scorpion men and merpeople, other sources containing the same myth do refer to her as a dragon.")
That wiki goes on to say that the multiheaded thing was mainly due to D&D in the 70's. Since dragon are 'her children', in a world where there's only 5 colors of evil dragons that would maybe make sense, but in a world like Golarion that's full of other types of dragons, linnorms, asian dragons etc. I wouldn't mind a return to a more ancient/fundamental massive sea dragon or beautiful naked glistening dame kinda Tiamat... in fact, I'm not exactly sure why she was made evil in the 70's D&D iteration. Does she have to be? Golarion already has an evil monster mother (Lamashtu) so perhaps Golarion's Tiamat could be a neutral even perhaps good 'monster mother' figure. (I haven't read Great Beyond in its entirety yet but upthread I saw those non-god power figures referred to as 'empyreal lords'... anyways if she's no god she could perhaps even predate them in Qlippoth kind of way, but from a neutral or good plane.)
Or evil. I'm not biased. I tend to agree with you James that evil and good don't need to be in equal numbers and that it may even make a setting more interesting. Based on my quick reading of the wiki (which doesn't tell the juicy bits of her story) she doesn't really spring to me as an all evil queen of dragons. There...
In my own setting, Tiamat actually IS Chaotic Good, though leans a bit more to Chaotic than Good half the time.
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Yay :D I've also toyed with idea of making Tiamat chaotic good, it sounds much more interesting twist than just importing D&D Tiamat to pathfinder.
Anyway, I'm kinda wondering why does D&D have to restrict what things you can do with Pathfinder :/ Its not like people don't use their own version of canon instead of official canon anyway when they want to
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Anyway, I'm kinda wondering why does D&D have to restrict what things you can do with Pathfinder :/ Its not like people don't use their own version of canon instead of official canon anyway when they want to
Because that would be Paizo directly making money off of WotC's intellectual property.
Paizo wouldn't let WotC publish anything with Golarion in it, either.
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I see your point. There's enough creative opportunities out there, still waiting and unexplored, without ever having to remodel the D&D classic takes on past mythologies, I agree. Fair enough...
About that... the Jyoti. Aside from its cool Sanskrit name origin (i.e. ज्योति ) did you guys create the whole concept behind them or have we seen them before in old manuals of the planes that I got rid of at the behest of my wife years back due to 'space' considerations? :) I really like the concept of the Jyoti!
Edit ref. Tiamat: still... scorpion men and merpeople? what up with that? Golarion got both... you sure she's not involved at some level? LOL
The jyoti are, as far as I know, 100% Pathfinder. Todd Stewart came up with them in "The Great Beyond" and we ran with that. There's been other positive energy creatures in previous editions and they certainly influenced some of what we've done with the same, but the jyoti are our own.
And I don't understand the parallel you're drawing between Tiamat and the other monsters. In any event, nope; no Tiamat in our world. I feel I've been pretty clear why, but I guess I'll repeat it.
We would have to do an entirely different Tiamat than gamers are mostly familiar with, so we instead went with a similar deity, Dahak, who fills that role. This leaves the name "Tiamat" open for individual GMs to use in their games as they wish—be it the D&D version or the mythological version—without feeling like Paizo disapproves or without feeling like they're going against world canon. That's really important to a lot of gamers, and I want to respect that.
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When you make a mindless undead, only a tiny fragment of the victim's soul is used to animate the undead. The soul itself goes on to be judged normally, or if the soul has ALREADY been judged, the fragments of soul left behind in the body (like the scent of one's body in a discarded garment) is what's used. This fragment gives the mindless undead the instinct to kill and ability to follow orders despite being non-intelligent, and while it's not EVIL on the scale of turning someone into a vampire or a ghoul, it's still evil enough that animate dead has the evil descriptor.
The soul itself would suffer in a non-destructive but painful way. Maybe something akin to having a fingernail torn off.
I now want to build a LG/LN necromancer making zombies and skeletons out of evil people to ensure that they keep on suffering after death :-)
Maybe he would specifically target those who escaped punishment in their mortal life :-)
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Anyway, I'm kinda wondering why does D&D have to restrict what things you can do with Pathfinder :/ Its not like people don't use their own version of canon instead of official canon anyway when they want toBecause that would be Paizo directly making money off of WotC's intellectual property.
Paizo wouldn't let WotC publish anything with Golarion in it, either.
Umm, I wasn't talking about them importing five headed Tiamat, I was talking about that I don't understand the reasoning about leaving space open for fan imports. Like, if they don't feel bad about importing a deity from another game to setting where they don't exist, why they would feel bad just because name is used by another thing?
Heck, I don't even like Tiamat that much, though I'm annoyed that since 3.5 dragon stuff(including bizarre silly dragon categories) was completely retconned, I have no clue what dragon deity lore is about. I mean, Dahak doesn't have mother anymore(which is really the only reason I'd like to have new Tiamat(well and I dislike D&D one hogging the cool name while having nothing to do with mythology), I liked the "two gods had a kid" trio thing), so the old creation story doesn't work anymore. And I did find the "Father wants to kill the evil son, but mom saved the evil son" thing cool. But that is still minor stuff, and isn't honestly that big deal, Apsu and Dahak aren't top of my list in interesting deities anyway(well, duh, if only reason I find them interesting is that they are gods with family relationship...), I'm just into reading about the lore. My main problem is that I just can't comprehend the reasoning about this fans feeling bad about homebrew stuff..
When you make a mindless undead, only a tiny fragment of the victim's soul is used to animate the undead. The soul itself goes on to be judged normally, or if the soul has ALREADY been judged, the fragments of soul left behind in the body (like the scent of one's body in a discarded garment) is what's used. This fragment gives the mindless undead the instinct to kill and ability to follow orders despite being non-intelligent, and while it's not EVIL on the scale of turning someone into a vampire or a ghoul, it's still evil enough that animate dead has the evil descriptor.
The soul itself would suffer in a non-destructive but painful way. Maybe something akin to having a fingernail torn off.
I now want to build a LG/LN necromancer making zombies and skeletons out of evil people to ensure that they keep on suffering after death :-)
Maybe he would specifically target those who escaped punishment in their mortal life :-)
You do realize that paying evil onto evil is still evil? <_<;
Then I believe Ragathiel should've fallen a loooong time ago if that were true. Attempting genocide by burning every fiend would definitely qualify as paying evil unto evil.
It depends how you do it, kill ten thousands fiends with a fire rain from the heaven is very very good, kill kill ten thousands fiends with an acid rain from the abyss is evil; it's just less evil than killing ten thousands angels with an acid rain from the abyss.
That's why The Raven Black's hypothetical character is on the fast track to evil, sure he might be able stay at LN if he continuously does very good deeds but he's on slippery slope to evil.