Barong's page

Hello, I've been gone from the forums for a long time, due to something I read regarding the lore(as well as personal issues). I'd read before that in PF, souls go to the boneyard, get judged and sent to whatever plane they should go. Then they exist as petitioners or outsiders before melding with their home plane after a long time. I'd always assumed that the melding was simply them ascending to a higher state of spiritual existence, known only to the gods, leaving their essence behind to add to the plane.

But no. From the official sources, souls after the melding are broken down and added to the plane, where they become a non-sentient rock, for example, before being further broken down by the maelstrom to go back to the positive plane as raw energy to make new souls. In essence, they're extinguished. It was upsetting when I read this. My characters, who I played, according to the lore, were going to have a few millennia of paradise before deciding "Oh well, guess I'll stop existing now," and then becoming a chair for some celestial or other.

I know it's just a game, but I like getting into the lore of settings, and this seemed so bleak and depressing(which I have enough to deal with IRL) that I just stepped away from the whole franchise. A few years later I got into 5e, but was disappointed at some of their design choices(let's just leave it at that).

I don't want to start a RL religious discussion I've seen some other threads elsewhere devolve into(we're just discussing PF cosmology). I guess what I'm getting at is it the same way in PF2e? I saw changes here and there I liked, and I'd like to come back. I'm sorry if this is so long, thank you for reading.

Like, if a half-orc worships Erastil or Cayden, human deities. Or, even more extreme, a bugbear decides to worship Shelyn. Or, going in the other direction, a human worshipping Torag, the dwarf deity.

As you can tell by my avatar, I think bears are cool. A long time ago I half-jokingly asked James Jacobs if they were ever going to introduce a bear-race in a future supplement. His response was basically "Never". I back-pedaled, admitting I was joking, but I still felt a little disappointed. But, like I said then, you can't have a full race for each animal under the sun. So recently, I thought I'd put a bear race down in my version of Golarion, probably in Iobaria. I have the ARG so I can make my own, but how do I keep it balanced against the core races? Are there any bear-races that someone else has made that I could use?

You're probably not familiar with the Shard RPG, sold here on Paizo. Simply put, it's a furry setting with heavy south-east Asian influences(primarily India). The setting has some good ideas including the crystal world the game takes place on, but it has something that I dislike: a caste system, including 'untouchables'(or outcaste as they're called here), along with gods that strictly enforce the status-quo. The book says that higher-caste must treat the outcaste kindly, but in real life this would never go that smoothly. It seems that the author wanted all the exoticness of caste systems without all the unpleasantness. I'd like to have some gods wander to this part of the universe, see the abuses suffered by the outcaste and low caste(who together make up a majority of the population), and decide to gift certain individuals their(PF)powers to help change things.

However, as a study of history shows, giving an oppressed underclass powerful weapons against the upper classes, can cause things to get violent very quickly. I don't know how to make change happen non-violently, short of the PC's gathering lots of outcaste and sailing for one of the(presumably)uninhabited continents of the world to establish their own country.

I'm thinking of just having the PC's play through the chaos some years after it's started, but they would miss the initial excitement of causing change themselves.

Sorry if this is long, I just wanted to sound some ideas I had for this world(when I see a setting like this, I like to think how I can mess it up >;).

I like writing things taking place in the pathfinder universe(and putting some of those things into my games). One story I had an idea for was a half-orc thrown out of his tribe for being lame in the leg(he became an oracle). He later converts to Shelyn and wants to convert his old orc tribe and maybe other tribes. How would he go about this? The orcs aren't just going to stand there well he goes on and on about 'Good lady Shelyn! You should worship her!' Maybe if was powerful(level 15 or so) and had cohorts with different abilities?

I seem to remember one PF book actually discussed this, but I can't remember which one.

It says in the Bestiary(and other PF sources) that Rakshasas are the reincarnated spirits of those mortals wholly given to materialistic evil. When they die they are eventually reincarnated again. So, what happens when a Rakshasa becomes good? The possibility of a good Rakshasa was discussed in the AP "Escape Ffrom Old Korvosa". If a good Rakshasa worships a god, do they get to go to them upon death?
Related is that it says a coupling between a Rakshasa and a mortal always results in a Rakshasa. How then do we get the Rakshasa sorceror bloodline for various mortal races? The description does say that your ancestors could have been tainted by a Rakshasa, but that leads to the next question. A sorceror with the bloodline who gets to Lvl 20 in a sense becomes a Rakshasa, expect with alignment unchanged and other things. Are they treated any different to pure mortal races in regards to the afterlife? I know just about all of this is fluff, but I'm writing my own campaign world and I'm just wondering how all this fits together.