Knockin' on Heaven's Door

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

In celebration of the release of Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Heaven Unleashed, I wanted to take a moment as one of the biggest fans of Heaven on the Paizo development staff to reveal a never-before-seen, behind-the-scenes peek at how exactly we went about building the great mountain of Heaven!

As is often the case at Paizo, we didn't build it all at once. For many years, we had dropped hints and brief descriptions of different locations within it, or discussed it in broad terms. While we had given the plane a very rough outline back in a book called The Great Beyond, that was one of the first setting books we ever did, and frankly we were still figuring a lot of things out back in those days and had no concept yet just how important Pathfinder's setting would become. (To give you a sense of how long ago that was: the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game didn't exist yet, folks currently running the adventure paths hadn't even started freelancing for Paizo, and Wes didn't yet have any stress-induced gray hair.) Since then, we'd revisited the plane various times—for instance, I got to explore the Great Library and Heathen Shore (Heaven's international district) in The Redemption Engine—but we'd never sat down and really hashed out a full outline of the plane.

While Heaven Unleashed is mostly a big book of cool encounters tied to Heaven, it was important to us to finally give a comprehensive overview of the plane—what the various layers are, who runs what, etc. So several of us sat down and brain-melded to try and figure out how to weave existing canon and new stuff together to create a framework for Heaven. There was plenty of pressure, for as Wes pointed out, a well-designed Heaven ought to be just as cool as Hell, especially since they're in many ways mirror reflections of each other. (Plus, it had always felt like a shame to both of us that everyone reads Dante's Inferno, but not even hardcore planar fans can be bothered to finish Paradiso...)

The result was this whiteboard sketch, with each of Heaven's seven's layers charted out. Here you can see our thoughts on the function of each layer and which souls go where, as well as our metaphysical musings about how the souls residing on certain layers "face outward," others face inward, and still others face beyond, toward Heaven's role in the multiverse. (We go down all sorts of theosophical rabbit holes around here.) And of course, there are the names of the layers, the identities and titles of the rulers of each layer, which gods live where... all the basics you need to know as a scholar of Heaven or just someone looking to petition the gods or kick some angelic ass.

You'll also notice a bunch of green boxes on the board. Those were for those layers or rulers who hadn't been named or decided yet when I took this picture. We've figured things out since then, of course, and I'm happy to say that I think we achieved our goal of making Heaven just as interesting as its unholy sister plane. But if you want to know the rest of the details... well, that's what the book is for, now isn't it?

James L. Sutter
Executive Editor