One of the mysteries of the Gap is how long it is.
Other than "thousands of years" between the Pathfinder timeline and the Starfinder timeline, there is no definite answer. Whether it's a couple thousand or several thousand is unknown.
How much time was lost -during- the Gap, sure. But before the Gap all time is lost too? Geez. Allright. Thanks! :D
Look at it this way, we in our real world have never had a gap and our history stretches back about 5-6 thousand years and we still find out new things about our history daily and have tons of things we do not know about our ancient world.
The one big advantage we have now is that our technology makes recording data and information a lot easier than any time before in human history. But if that data was magically wiped from our tech? We would be stumped too.
It is very possible that ancient, physical historical materials, pre gap, were old enough to not physically survive the interim. Even assuming it was saved to electronic format during the gap, that would have been wiped because of the gap.
Also keep in mind that in our world we went from flintlocks and outhouses to hand held computers and satellites in less than 3 centuries.
The rate of technological advancement on Golarion could have been slightly slower since magic does so much we develop science to do in our world or it could have been vastly faster if magic was used to co develop it. That is up for the GM to determine.
But even if the gap was only one millenia long, science could have come a LONG way in that 1000 years.
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That's just it, we don't know be because the history before the Gap is lost.
I'm pretty sure that's not the case. It's stated that history lines up again before the Gap, and that historians do know quite a bit about that.
It's the history in the Gap that's messed up, and nobody knows how long it was. My personal theory is that Pathfinder takes place in the Gap. Would give both Pathfinder and Starfinder designers the greatest flexibility.
It's interesting from a narrative standpoint but infuriating from a scientific standpoint.
My suggestion? Don't think about it too hard or you'll get mad. Enjoy it for what it is. It's a way for them to artfully ignore centuries to millenia of scientific development and history.
The gap seems to have lasted several thousand years. So unless it's a dragon, a deity, undead, or a druid with a reincarnate contingency, they almost certainly couldn't have lived through it.
It seems, from the lore, that people living during the gap didn't notice anything amiss. Society didn't collapse and people were obviously doing stuff. It's as if the Universe did a garbage collection at the end of it and lost all the contextual data for several millennia. The edges are 'fuzzy', in that they seem to have begun and ended at different times in different places, and there are rare islands of coherence (like moments of clarity) interspersed though the epoch.
Anything that happened before it is fine as is anything that happened afterward, but who did what to whom and when, why, and how they did it during it are all lost.
The gap seems to have lasted several thousand years. So unless it's a dragon, a deity, undead, or a druid with a reincarnate contingency, they almost certainly couldn't have lived through it.
I'm not certain on this, but aren't most non-native outsiders unaging, too? Like elementals, genies, and the vast number of aligned outsiders. They can certainly die, but not from old age, I think.
It seems, from the lore, that people living during the gap didn't notice anything amiss. Society didn't collapse and people were obviously doing stuff. It's as if the Universe did a garbage collection at the end of it and lost all the contextual data for several millennia.
It's weirder than even that, because it's stated that records are not just missing or incomplete, but contradictory. So, it's possible that some timeline shenanigans were involved and that there isn't one single history. The entry on the Sun in the CRB mentions the possibility of warped time, so this is not out of the question. This makes the existence of those islands of coherence even stranger and more interesting.
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There are specifically bone sages that were around before the gap, but the gap is also said to not have lasted the same amount of time each location, so there's some wiggle room there.
"while the Gap is universal—and a combination of carbon dating and astrochronology suggest it lasted several millennia—its edges are geotemporally inconsistent. Where one star system might have accurate records stretching back 300 years from the present, worlds in different parts of the galaxy might have 310 years of history, or only 275. Some scholars have even uncovered rare “caches” within the Gap—places where accounts seem suddenly consistent for a given period or topic"
Also: "...sometimes uncover documents referring to dates in ar or “Absalom Reckoning,” a measurement believed to have been used for nearly 5 millennia..." which could mean many different things.
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I'm not certain on this, but aren't most non-native outsiders unaging, too? Like elementals, genies, and the vast number of aligned outsiders. They can certainly die, but not from old age, I think.
My list wasn't meant to be exhaustive, just exemplary. Yes, anything that doesn't age (like demons or Genie) would also work.
It's weirder than even that, because it's stated that records are not just missing or incomplete, but contradictory. So, it's possible that some timeline shenanigans were involved and that there isn't one single history. The entry on the Sun in the CRB mentions the possibility of warped time, so this is not out of the question. This makes the existence of those islands of coherence even stranger and more interesting.
Time Travel paradoxes are also an interesting possibility. My own pet theory is that the SF universe is a simulation and the memory got corrupt. A bunch of the pointers point to garbage in the data, empty memory addresses, or to the wrong data.
I could have sworn that I read somewhere that there were pre-Gap elves still around.
There are. And they're salty as hell about it.
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I could have sworn that I read somewhere that there were pre-Gap elves still around.
Elves don't live thousands of years(only hundreds), there are elves who were around during the gap but there are no living elves around from before the (pre) gap.
the elven generation whose lives extended back into the Gap continued on, broken and confused by the blank centuries in their own lives and memories. What’s more, those leaders charged with trying to piece together their social history from scraps soon came to a grim conclusion: during the Gap, their race had been betrayed by another—yet exactly which race was involved remains unclear, all suggestions of the answer scrubbed by malicious intent or the Gap itself.
That is why there are satly AF.
I figured (headcanon) that there was also some galactic+ level oddities that prevented easy dating along with carbon dating like stuff. Like, "well, if we just take stellar drift we should be able to see how much things have changed since our reference star chart!'
but then they realize Star X has moved this much, but Star B has only moved this much, and Star A has moved waaaay this much, so even things like normal expansion/movement is all screwy.
That's what I was thinking too. That most of them are within a few decades of where they're supposed to be for the timeline, but there are enough weird outliers that they can't be sure if it's 2000 years or 3000 years (or whatever the actual timeline looks like).
Pathfinder's Numeria: A giant ship from the stars crashed on Golarion. There are multiple PFS Scenario's set there. My idea was claiming that my (specificly created for technomancy knowledge) character ventured in there and managed/needed to put her conciousness in an Android core. I retired her in such a scenario where that was done. (as in several PFS scenario's has happened to npc's), thenforth surviving as an Android.... and in Starfinder recreated as an Android. I just needed to know how 'old' the Starfinder Android would be on the character sheet.
You do know that Androffan androids aren't unaging, right? If the android body wasn't in stasis for the vast majority of the intervening period between PF and SF, it would have gone through reset (returning the body to factory settings, undoing aging while deleting the previous personality).
Aside from that, I'm fairly certain SF androids are not Androffan-type androids, being less skinjob and more toaster.
Can’t they carbon date Absalom Station to at least get a “minimum” amount of time passes?
I think Carbon dating is specifically called out in the lore as giving inconsistent results for things it applies to, along with all other forensic methods of dating things (like geology, astronomy, et cetera).
What's an Androffan android? I thought androids were still androids in the same way that dwarves are still dwarves and elves are still elves.
Is that not the case?
My understanding is that Androffan androids refer to the specific ones created in time immemorial (read Pathfinder setting) by the First Ones, while 'normal' androids are their modern iterations, created primarily by humans (well, human run corporations).
My understanding is that Androffan androids refer to the specific ones created in time immemorial (read Pathfinder setting) by the First Ones, while 'normal' androids are their modern iterations, created primarily by humans (well, human run corporations).
Right my understanding is that Humans reverse engineered the ones we have in the current Starfinder timeline from the original Androffan Androids.
My understanding is that Androffan androids refer to the specific ones created in time immemorial (read Pathfinder setting) by the First Ones, while 'normal' androids are their modern iterations, created primarily by humans (well, human run corporations).
So who or what are the First Ones? And how do their androids differ from modern ones (mechanically and conceptually)?
First Ones is the Anacite name/title for the beings that originally created them and the Androffan androids. They're a 'progenitor' race of some sort. They came to PW space a long time ago, they're tied heavily into Anacite culture and the ruins of their ancient cities are scattered across Aballon. They're in the PF lore somewhere, but I'm not very versed on that.
Thank you for the correction. I had gotten the impression that the Androffan and First Ones were the same race from somewhere. My bad.
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Its certainly possible, though the way Absalom Station is described it definitely feels "organic" to me, like it was a place that was actually built and populated over time, rather than in a singular instance of godlike exertion. I suspect it predated the end of the Gap and whatever event caused it; even if Golarion's disappearance was part of this, Absalom Station could have easily been a station in orbit around Golarion or such.
As for calculating the minimum length of the Gap, honestly, I think the closest thing to a good method is to look at social and technological change. The last known point prior to the Gap is the Pathfinder era on Golarion, which is roughly the equivalent of the late renaissance/early modern era on Earth ( 15th century give or take ). Immediately after the Gap, the spaceborn society clearly derived from Golarion is a mature space based society with full access to the entire solar system, and limited access to FTL travel. Obviously, we don't know how long that would "actually" take, but based on various fictional precedents, calling that a thousand years of change seems a good guestimate. Sure, it could be lower ( due to unusually fast technical advancement, maybe from preexisting advanced societies or interventionist gods ), or it could be higher ( due to bouts of medieval stasis or disruptive apocalypses ), but its at least a decent starting point.
remember though that in PF Golarion has essentially been at the same level of technology for like, 3000 years.
nothing Paizo likes longer than an extraordinarily long timeline [I condense my post-Gap timeline to just a century, rather than the 300 in the canon].
I got it in my head that it was roughly 3,000 years between Pathfinder and Starfinder, but I have no clue where that came from. The lack of familiar ethnic and national touchstones from Golarion in SF makes it feel like anything we know is in the distant past.
EDIT: Huh. I wonder what the apparent loss of Golarion means for Zon-Kuthon’s pact with Nidal?
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The take I've settled on is that history wasn't erased, it was broken. Conduct physical analysis to determine an object's age -- be it the red-shift of stars, carbon dating a skeleton, geological surveys of fissures on Apostae -- and you'll get answers.
But the answers wildly conflict with each other.
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The take I've settled on is that history wasn't erased, it was broken. Conduct physical analysis to determine an object's age -- be it the red-shift of stars, carbon dating a skeleton, geological surveys of fissures on Apostae -- and you'll get answers.
But the answers wildly conflict with each other.
Rovagog got out of golarion and broke a well of space time that the gods had to put back together would explain a lot....
Mortals" Wait.. did you just yadda yadda yadda the last three thousand years of the campaign?
Gods " We kind had to our dog ate the notes....
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My theory on the gap is something happened to generate a "Schrodinger's Cat" situation. Everything inside the time of the gap is an uncertainty event. Every choice that could have been made was both made and not made. That is why no records can be proven true, why no one can remember what happened and even the gods arent actually certain because everything is both false and true during that time. This allows everyone's play through campaigns and APs to be true at the same time.
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The time between Pathfinder and Starfinder is hard to measure because the gap never really ended, evidence of this is available in these froums. Starfinder frequently has a gap in posting over the weekend whereas Pathfinder does not. So if you had to measure time might be safer to do it form the Pathfinder side going forward than looking back from Starfinder.
Starfinders only you can help end the gap...