KtA's page

49. Snow frog. These strange bluish-green frogs are found only in cold areas where megafauna such as mammoths, dire tigers, and dire bears dwell. An adult snow frog cannot survive prolonged temperatures much below 10 F, but its eggs can. Snow frogs lay eggs in the first deep snows of winter, then the adults die. When the spring thaw arrives, the snow melts and the eggs hatch into tadpoles, which rapidly develop into snow frogs. A snow frog lives less than one year, from hatching in spring to dying in early winter. (Toad statistics).

50. Gliglis lizard. Small, arboreal lizards that dwell in dense jungles. They are bright red with purple and azure splotches - dramatic warning coloration. A gliglis lizard has a strongly venomous bite, but doesn't normally attack anything larger than a frog or small rat. (Lizard statistics, but with the poison of a viper and CR 1/2).

51. Lisil frog. Found in the same dense jungles as the gliglis lizard, the lisil frog has a bizarre life cycle. The female lisil frog does not lay eggs. Instead, when the eggs are developed, the female begins to emit a scent irresistible to predators. If the female frog is eaten by a bird or mammal, the high body temperature prevents the eggs from developing properly and they are simply digested. But if it is eaten by a lizard or snake, the eggs hatch into tadpoles inside the predator's digestive system, swimming in the digestive fluids. By the time they are excreted, they have developed into froglings that can live independently. (Toad statistics.)

lemeres wrote:

Why isn't everyone trained in the intricacies of electronic repair, auto repair, and computer programming in real life?

But most people do know how to use a VCR, drive a car, and surf the web, right? I'll spot you that not everybody would be wizards; but I would expect magical items to be plentiful and cheaper.

But magic items aren't tech. Once you have the infrastructure, you can manufacture technology in large quantities fairly cheaply.

But a magic item has to be made by a specific person with magical powers. It's not necessarily going to be cheaper or easier to make just because you're making 100,000 of them.

Mechanically, there's a certain base cost to build any magical item, so they won't be cheap enough to be available to most people. Further, they take time from those rare, skilled people, so there probably won't be enough, even if a rich government tried to give them out to its people. A couple of wizards can't run an assembly line that lets them make thousands of wands per day.

So magic isn't practical to mass produce and magic stays mostly in the hands of spellcasters and very rich people.

On the other hand, magic probably suppresses tech development, because for those very rich people the magic items are available... note guns are most advanced in Alkenstar, where magic is unreliable.

Azlant etc. probably had a higher proportion of spellcasters for some reason.

I still don't see it.

There's no reason dumping waste in the cold or hot zones should necessarily lead to worse air pollution than we have now on Earth -- and if they skip the messy things like coal (does Verces even HAVE coal?)

Verces' ecosystem might in some way be more vulnerable due to the limited area, but it's not THAT limited. The area of the "Ring" is probably at least that of a small continent. And the air should not be especially more vulnerable. The air mass will be comparable to Earth, so pollutants shouldn't build up any faster.

(There is the possibility that Verces' less plant life could mean faster CO2 buildup. But I don't think Verces uses fossil fuels, and quite possibly never did. Their tractors and such would be electric -- solar or nuclear sources of power -- or biofuel based. So no net CO2 buildup.)

And more primitive farming means certainly doesn't increase the atmosphere (are you thinking in terms of oxygen concentration?) compared to more advanced methods. If Verces really had oxygen issues, modern farming technologies could mean more photosynthesis per acre per year and thus more oxygen. (But if it had oxygen issues, native intelligence would be adapted to lower oxygen.)

Eh. I just don't see it working. Maybe it could be ingrained strongly enough to persist (though I doubt it, given the marrying across castes thing - IMO that just doesn't fit the nature of a class or caste system). But however strongly ingrained it is now... how did it get that way?

Eox makes contact with Golarion and their Song of Silence cult of undeath finds common cause with the Whispering Way... possibly leading to a freed Tar-Baphon as Eox's puppet king to keep Golarion in line, backed up by tzitzimitls and orbital strikes from Eoxian spaceships.

(Or, at least, the version of Earth that was visited by Baba Yaga's hut in 1918 and where Rasputin had bona-fide magical powers.)

Which seems to also be the version of Earth where R'lyeh is.

Here's a take on Merlin. I made him a sorcerer, but with a version of Old-Mage Jatembe's ability to use druid spells.

I think also some of the Conan stories, given the whole barbarians thing...

Conan encounters a bunch of "Mythos" creatures some of which are definitely extraterrestrials (like Yag-kosha/Yogah from "The Tower of the Elephant"), and encounters a decadent remnant of a civilization that mixes science and magic in "Xuthal of the Dusk" with artificially generated food, radium lights, healing potions, and a Lovecraftian alien horror.

IIRC the lost city in "Red Nails" has some ambiguous-if-it's-science-or-magic stuff too, like a lightning weapon/wand and the ability to resurrect "dragons" (apparently dinosaurs) from fossils.

The Thing from Beyond the Edge wrote:

modular armor: total cost 44900 gp

1.armor slot: reinforced ballistic armor (from Bullet Point: 6 Anachronistic Armors (PFRPG) PDF) with the psionic enhancement fusing for +2, landing for +4000, and linked for +6000 in addition to enhancement bonuses. Made of adamantine for 10000 gp.
Notes: medium armor +6 armor bonus (before enhancements), +8 vs firearms and such attacks are not made as touch attacks, AC penalty is -2 (-1 when fused), treated as light for movement restrictions when fusing is activated. DR 2/-.
Cost with +1 enhancement: 29900 gp
2. chest slot: shirt, quick runner's cost 1000 gp
3. body and helm slots: pressure suit cost 4000 gp
4. magic belt, ideally belt of physical perfection but you can't have everything. But, let's say a belt of physical might +2 strength, +2 constitution, cost 10000 gp

What, no built-in Mark VII Blasters or Mini-missile launchers?

Nah, I want the Black Ray pistol! (Power Word: Kill, 50 charges?)

bugleyman wrote:

Abyssal Lord wrote:

I wonder why is everybody so eager to cap the level off at 20th level.

While it is true that "20th level" only has meaning in the context of the system, all the math is built around it. Trying to bolt on bigger numbers after the fact hasn't worked well (see D&D 3rd edition Epic Level Handbook).

It worked very well up to level 26 at least.

I'm kinda sad this will never happen, but I'm still holding out for hope we will get rules and stats for gods.

This is because the kind of story I'm most interested in playing involves contending with gods.

I don't think Paizo will actually do it, but I think it's quite viable to stat gods so they work with the existing (level-capped, including Mythic) rules.

The thing is to make gods something other than 20 HD/60 class level characters with some unique divine abilities tacked on as they were in 3rd ed.

Instead gods should be -- IMO -- statted about like demigods but with special, sweeping, cosmic abilities -- more plot-level stuff than combat-time stuff.

Lamashtu might be about as powerful in a direct fight as the other CR 30 demon lords, but she might be able to quickly and easily create new monsters from scratch, and turn her cultists into powerful and unique demons in her service, and do dramatic things with the planar structure of the Abyss, etc.

Gorum might be able to induce rage in an entire army, or apply greater magic weapon to every blade of one side in an entire nation-spanning war, or create an army of metal constructs out of raw ore.

That sort of thing...

Now the really powerful super-gods e.g. Rovagug and Pharasma might be genuinely beyond stats, but I'd prefer not, honestly.

One thing you are overlooking is the deeply ingrained caste system. This sort of social structure is a self-reinforcing design. Both the God-Vessel & the Augmented are smaller & by cultural/caste mandate unable to wed within their own castes. The may only marry a Pure Ones caste member. This places the Pure Ones in the control seat. Neither caste can continue without the Pure Ones co-operation.

Yeah, but I kind of think that setup would end up diluting the whole idea of the castes really fast.

Also, one would think Augmented would have more in common with other Augmented, etc.

I can sort of see it lasting once established, in a really tradition bound society, but why would it be set up that way in the first place?
Presumably there were no Augmented at one time, so the current caste system must have developed from something else...

I realize that a caste social system is a bit alien to most American & Western European mentalities. Look at the Indian sub-continent for an ingrained caste system. To marry outside ones caste is to become a social, cultural, & familial exile. Now compound that pressure by an entire planetary society utilizing that caste/value system.

And that might well have worked ... up till now. But now that one nation (Kashak) has broken the mold, I'd expect it to spread fast.

The are interconnected in their cultural beliefs & the necessities of continued racial survival.

But I don't see how a system based on enshrining really inefficient labor-intensive low-tech means of food production helps them survive.

I mean, a system like that would certainly help some grassland/hedge species that can live in disturbed areas (ones that are declining on Earth now with huge monocultures) but...

And Verces has very limited arable land area so there should be a huge push for efficient farming. The whole 'ring' area would likely be totally managed, even the 'natural' areas, at their tech level.

I'm not a big fan of Andoran or Galt; adding American and French Revolutions seems to me to be a step too far away from the Medieval or at most Renaissance / Early Modern stuff of the rest of the world culturally.

Andoran, Galt and Alkenstar seem to me sort of like they belong on a different planet, or a different campaign setting.

Dunno where this came from.

As told by the lorekeepers of the Shobhad-neh:

Before Great Ka was raised, when the world was blue with ocean and green with the great forests and the rain-watered grasslands, the Shobhad-neh lifted their heads from the dust of Akiton and learned to look upon the stars. We were the first of all things that thought or spoke, and we were before the gods came to Akiton.

The Shobhad-neh grew numerous and explored the world from pole to pole. In a green valley we found the first of the Dreamers, who knew strange magic, and on the wide dry plains we found the Scaled Ones. Yet we knew nothing of iron, nor of magic to heal or to destroy, nor of the ways of the gods.

Then the Gray Lady of Souls and the Iron Hand and the Golden Lady of the Dawn came to Akiton and went among the peoples, and taught them of fate and of war and of mercy. The Shobhad-neh and the Scaled Ones followed the Iron Hand, the prince of battles; the Dreamers followed the Gray Lady of Souls, the queen of prophecy. And the Golden Lady of the Dawn wept three tears, and turned away to walk the wandering stars; thus Akiton has ever been a world without mercy.

The Iron Hand taught the Shobhad-neh of iron, and swords and shields were forged, for before we had known only the spear and the club. He gave his power to his chosen and made them healers and captains of war, and taught the magic of battle to the wise of the people. The Dreamers learned great magic and made a door across the worlds, and a new people came to Akiton, the Little Folk who have but two arms.

Then the great war of the gods came, when they fought against the Hungry One on the blue wandering star beyond the skies. The Golden Lady of the Dawn took the fires of the sun to herself as a sword, and it was made dim.

The Iron Hand took the greatest warriors of the Shobhad-neh to fight beneath his banner. In wrath and fear at their advance, the Hungry One struck Akiton to the heart, and the blood of the world poured from the wound and became Great Ka. The smoke of Great Ka darkened the skies. Thus did the cold come upon the world...

---

And yeah, Gorum is supposed to have originated in the Age of Darkness according to pathfinderwiki, but he's simply too good a fit for Akiton and the Shobhads...

EDIT: to make the title for Sarenrae consistent (I had "Lady of the Golden Face" in one place)

I just noticed something. Distant Worlds page 54 says:

"The great capital ship that crashed in Numeria, for instance, is obviously beyond the technological capability of any current races—
presumably coming from some other star, dimension, or era."

Which doesn't actually say that it's definitely from outside the solar system, as I first thought. It could still be from Aballon's First Ones, or the pre-undeadification civilization of Eox...

He REALLY didn't agree with or care for Price's interpretation of Yog-Sothoth or the other ideas presented in the story (as they pretty much ran entirely contrary to his entire philosophy as presented in his other stories), but he was caught by his agreement to the collaboration

Interesting. Not that I doubt you, but where did you learn this? Sounds like something I would like to read...

So, as far a strict interpretation of Lovecraft's mythology goes, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" holds only a little bit more weight than do Derleth's later "post-humous collaborations" that invented such lame ideas as the Elemental paradigm of the Great Old Ones, that did things such as make Cthulhu a Water Elemental, and made Nhyarlathotep an Earth Elemental for some inexplicable reason.

Ah, OK.

Though I really don't mind the Derleth stuff. I mean, it doesn't actually mesh with Lovecraft's own stuff very well (how is Cthulhu's telepathy blocked by water if he's a water elemental) -- but neither does the Clark Ashton Smith stuff like "The Door to Saturn" and "The Seven Geases", really, where the Mythos 'gods' are treated very differently.

The nature of the Mythos is that different authors take it in different directions, and that was true from day one (Hastur actually started out as a basically benign being in the original Bierce story...)

Gandalf wasn't an elf...

The Norse Gandalf is referred to as an Elf.

Both correct. Tolkien borrowed a whole bunch of names from the Norse Eddas when he wrote "The Hobbit".

Later, after he wrote "The Lord of the Rings" and combined the "Hobbit" world with his "Silmarillion" mythology with all its meticulously invented languages and very detailed background, he came to regret that (at least in the case of the dwarves, maybe not specifically Gandalf) - there's some quote about a "rabble of Eddaic-named dwarves".

A device that had an effect on someone's behavior that radical in the real world would have to work by very "compulsion" type means, overriding or making irrelevant someone's free will in drugs/brainwashing/etc type ways, and so would be evil. But we can't (IMO) accurately transfer that judgment to the actual Helm, which is a totally different process impossible in our Universe.

If a Helm of Opposite Alignment forced you to do Good (or Evil) things against your will, it would be a compulsion effect. It isn't.

So I don't think we can describe its effect in terms of compulsion.

So only two possibilities seem open:

-- It convinces you to change alignment, by magically effective means yes, but not by overriding your free will -- and makes that change magically effective (ie habits don't seem to remain). This wouldn't, I think, be morally problematic.

-- It magically causes you to freely will to change your alignment, and makes that change magically effective. This is completely impossible (indeed kind of self-contradictory), in our world anyway, and so I'm not sure anything can be meaningfully said about its morality.

The second is I think what's intended, to the degree either is intended (I don't think the creators of the helm of opposite alignment put nearly this much thought into it). It certainly seems what's implied by the text (in that the subject likes their new alignment and doesn't want to change back).

That (that they don't want to change back) is also interesting because there's no suggestion that the helm affects your memory. So the subject knows the change was caused by the helm, and still likes it --which certainly implies that, at the very least, it isn't perceived as a compulsion or enforced change.

Magic on the level of PF spells and abilities would break the world to the point that our ideas of economics, politics, war, culture, or the environment would simply be completely incomprehensible to us.

Hardly. It's just another form of technology. Different from ours, yes, but not incomprehensible.

To give those of you who still seem incapable of understanding this fundamental concept, you should look up the "Singularity"

Yes, the idea of the "Singularity" has the exact same flaw: thinking that because something bypasses the limitations we are familiar with, it has no limitations at all ;)

I dunno. I'm 40 hp short when I add it up.

Maybe they added the Mythic Toughness bonus twice?

KtA wrote:

This post is "world implications" only - not mechanical balance, which I don't feel qualified to judge ...

The point about whether it is better to appease or confront an aggressor was made before, and then I think somebody drew a parallel with The Magnificent Seven!

I accept that if you conclude it is better to appease an aggressor then Slumber Hex is not a good option.

If you are forced to defend yourself, then I still think it is.

Anyway -- the following assuming an "overt" or "frontal" attack where the village sees the creature coming:

It's certainly a viable option, even a very useful one. But it's only situationally better than other options.

Against raiding orcs, or goblins, hobgoblins, or other 1HD monsters, a sleep spell can take out up to 4 orcs (yes, the witch can keep casting slumber hex every round at a different orc, but action economy matters too). Color spray can also affect multiple creatures.

Going up to 2nd level spells, I'd consider summoning a couple of celestial eagles with summon monster II. Summon swarm will be pretty devastating since such monsters aren't likely to have anything useful against swarms.

Against a dire animal or dinosaur (or a big normal predator like a tiger) a druid might be as good an option as the slumber hex witch. Against a wolf pack, a calm animals spell from the druid may be better,
because it can affect multiple targets.

Against skeletons or zombies or ghouls, which are immune to sleep, a cleric or paladin is better than a slumber hex witch. (Especially a cleric with the Turn Undead feat or a paladin with the undead scourge archetype.) Even a village militia would be a better option. How common undead are probably depends on where you are -- in Ustalav, pretty common, maybe not so much elsewhere.

Dragons, constructs, oozes and plants are immune to sleep just like undead, but these are likely pretty rare threats and the village is probably hosed no matter what against a major golem or adult dragon.

So... in some situations (one or a few monsters with high HP and low Will saves) a slumber hex witch will be better.

In other situations, a sorcerer with sleep and color spray... or a Heavens mystery oracle with color spray... or a druid... or a cleric... would be better.

So, no, I don't think Slumber Hex massively changes the village vs monsters situation as a whole.

Assuming, of course, that you are ever going to need to. At the moment the consensus seems to be that single intelligent marauders would never have attacked a settlement prior to the discovery of the Slumber Hex weapon.

Not never, just only if their advantage is overpowering (like the anteater vs ant colony example).

If you're a huge powerful dragon with all saves high and breath weapon and awesome mobility and spellcasting, you can.

But dragons are immune to sleep anyway. So maybe a flying demon like a vrock or balor would be a better example.

If I'm following your argument, however, would it make sense for an intelligent marauder to attack with stealth at night rather than with terror during the day?

Yes.

Would the development of the Slumber Hex weapon make a change to such a tactic? Maybe not from a 1st level Witch, but what about a 2nd level one who catches sight of you from her bedroom window?

And is that situation common enough for you to worry about ? -

Well, no. A good stealth predator shouldn't be seen by anybody except the victim, most attacks, as I understand it. I think people in the villages that had lion and leopard problems just disappeared, mostly.

So the chance that the one person that manages to spot it on occasion -- or that it selected as prey -- is the witch with slumber hex is not high*

It might well be useful for people hunting the predator down, but that still doesn't really change the "terrorizes the village till a party gets together and hunts it down" situation.

though taking your point that even a small chance of failure is unacceptable to a predator.

No, not quite. Most predator attacks in the wild fail harmlessly. It's a small chance of death (or injury to the point it can't feed itself, for solitary predators) that adds up quickly over the hundreds of attacks that predator makes over its lifetime.

On the other hand, it does have to take risks eventually, or it starves. But avoidable risks... not so much.

This post is "world implications" only - not mechanical balance, which I don't feel qualified to judge.

@richard develyn:

If slumber changes the game it's an entirely beneficial change. You're only thinking of the giants, not the villagers. You can't have both giants and villagers unless the giants either have no desire to raid the villagers or the giants' desire to raid the villagers is outweighed by their fear of the villagers.

If you want a sensible setting with human or demihuman civilizations you must place humans and demihumans at the top of the food chain. Prey species cannot settle until they first exterminate their predators or teach them fear.

...or unless they find a stable equilibrium. Ant colonies are not exterminated by anteaters.

Also, most predators in the real world don't just attack things blindly. Predators prefer to go after known and recognized prey. A predator has to make LOTS of successful kills in its lifetime; if each one brings even a few percent chance of getting killed, then the predator is unlikely to survive to reproduce.

You don't need slumber hex witches to make most predators wary of attacking villages in the sense proposed here -- where the villagers are aware of its approach and can organize to meet it. Predators won't do that ANYWAY, unless they are utterly overwhelming on the level of anteater vs ant colony (something like an adult red dragon vs a village).

Real world man-eating predators go after people when they are alone and vulnerable. They can terrorize villages, there are cases of individual lions and leopards eating dozens or hundreds of people, but they kill one person at a time, at night, without alerting others. They don't charge into the town square and attack crowds. Crocodiles take individual swimmers or individual people gathering water from the river. They do not charge out of the river and invade towns.

And many raiding monsters (especially humanoid type ones -- orcs, ogres, giants) may not base their diet on humans -- getting much more of their actual calorie allotment from stealing crops, livestock etc. from the humans. So the relationship is more like a conqueror exacting tribute than a predator and prey. These would probably set up more like a tribe, or like a gang extorting protection money -- IE they would not be attacking a village alone.

Also, on the Slumber Hex bit specifically - a village has to consider the consequences of trying it and failing. If they have a 50% chance of failing... then that's a 50% chance of likely many or most of their strongest workers (probably the people wielding weapons) dying, quite possibly leaving the village to starve. Much safer to offer a few livestock and hope it keeps the giant satisfied for a while...

TL;DR: Slumber hex is not very world-changing because the precautions predators/raiders would need to take to avoid/survive it, are ones they would "realistically" be taking anyway.

Detect Magic wrote:

Conan meets Star Trek isn't really my bag, dig?

Conan met a space alien once. It was the slave of a magical sorcerer. It flew all the way from the planet Yag.

There's also a high-tech lost city -- lit by "radium gems" and surviving on scientifically manufactured food -- in one story ("Xuthal of the Dusk" aka "The Slithering Shadow").

Yeah, portals can be anywhere obscure. Random magic malfunction is also good.

---

And while this thread is back up... some thoughts...

I have a feeling there is a lot of subtle use of minor magic in Vercite technology, and probably always has been. The Vercite development of tech might have run into all kinds of problems we didn't really have on Earth since their habitable area is so limited. By the time the Industrial Revolution hit, Europe had access to materials from most of the world. The farming and weapons industry in the 19th and early 20th century were heavily dependent on very specific/localized sources of nitrates. There was a South American "Saltpeter War" over sources of nitrates in I think the Atacama desert. Guano-rich islands in the Pacific were a big deal.

War of the Pacific (aka the "Saltpeter War")
US Guano Islands Act - claiming guano-rich islands

Rubber came from one specific part of the world. There isn't oil everywhere. I think some metals are very region specific, etc. etc. Vercites might use magical help in their chemical industry, magical gaskets, magically treated metals, etc.

So some Vercite tech might malfunction in an antimagic field, even with no visible/overt magic...

---

For similar reasons, I think that the Vercites might have skipped fossil fuels entirely and gone straight from waterwheels and wood-burning steam engines to solar power.

Which implies a lot of power limitations till late in the game... and thus suggests an interesting setup where real, large scale industrialization is a fairly new thing on Verces -- it hit at maybe a 1980-2010 level of technology. That actually makes a lot of sense to me with the Pure Ones still being a viable force in politics -- if Vercite civilization didn't have the industrial base/resources to give tractors and such to every farmer until well into their space age, that could have led to the Pure Ones and Augmented becoming genuinely two different cultures.

Which means Kashak may be the wave of the future, and only unique so far because of Verces' respect for tradition.

In fact:
"the Pure Ones, as those responsible for the business of food production, are by necessity the most populous class,"

i.e. most people are farmers. This seems really unstable -- on Earth people tended to move off the farms pretty fast with industrialization, even when conditions in the cities were much, much worse than anything likely to be prevalent on Verces.

I'm not sure that the Agmazar thing is necessarily that bad.

The text says "the Balance, its makers upon the planet Verces, who created it as an ultimate weapon against undead invaders from Eox"

and

"After Agmazar had great victories, its overambitious creators launched
it into space to take the fight to Eox itself."

So it was a defensive weapon originally, and only launched in an offensive strike after Eox struck first. This isn't a preemptive strike or anything.

I don't really see anything wrong here... especially since if Eox is all liches then it's pretty much solidly and universally evil.

Then there's the theory that Yog-Sothoth used to be active in the Middle East. In any case, Nyarlathotep may not be the only Outer God with a humanoid avatar.

Well, even in Lovecraft "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" Yog-Sothoth has "manifestations" - the Ancient Ones and 'Umr at-Tawil, which are at least vaguely humanoid (they're cloaked in robes and look humanoid, but the motions suggest something else).

Of course, that story also says that "all great wizards, all great thinkers, all great artists" are "facets" of Yog-Sothoth, so ... who knows. Consistency was never really the point.

Sure, a fireball spell is predictable and repeatable. (Though I agree that magic is "art like" in the sense that each individual spellcaster has to adapt the techniques to make it work for them.)

But the flip side of that is that you can't make "a better fireball" without making it higher level (or mythic or whatever. But not a better one that is as easily accessible.)

So the nature of magic pushes away from innovation and toward learning what's always worked. Magical research is less about experimentation and more about digging through libraries and ruins to find lost spells from Thassilon or whatever.

Spells now are probably basically the same as those before Earthfall, minus some that got lost and plus some that got developed to fill the gaps. But the most common spells -- a low-to-mid level wiz/sorc's basic toolkit, those least likely to get forgotten -- probably haven't changed since Golarion's Neolithic.

---

I don't really believe that tech innovation is necessarily "natural" even in our world. The leap to an industrial age only happened once, it just ended up spreading to most of the world.

China in say 1200 or Rome in say 100 was probably 'as advanced' in most ways as Europe in Copernicus' day. But only one of those three societies went on to produce a Scientific Revolution and then an Industrial Revolution.

It seems to me that that 'leap' required a particular social or cultural setup. Without that, innovations still occur, but they don't get combined and built on in the way you need to get industrialization. Gunpowder came from China, but guns were really perfected in Europe, weren't they? The Byzantine Empire had Greek fire, but they kept the secret so closely it was eventually lost. The Greco-Romans of 100 AD had primitive steam engines ("aeolipile") and complex clockwork mechanical astronomical calculators (the Antikythera mechanism) -- and being able to build that implies an existing technology of clockworks -- but nothing ever came of them.

I read history more as civilizations getting "stuck" at what I would call a 'high steel age' level (EDIT: being as likely as anything else. So I can totally buy Golarion being that level for ages upon ages. And guess what? Alkenstar seems to have started to break out of that being "stuck" -- in a magic poor/unreliable magic area. Which strongly suggests that Golarion also has magic acting as a brake on tech.)

If the fighter were to be rewritten, I would say he should get class features that are exceptional/superhuman but not explicitly 'magical', instead extensions of the things in his existing role.

Things like a version of display of strength (the mythic ability), ability to ignore hardness or DR of constructs up to a certain level, holding breath for hours underwater/resistance/immunity to inhaled poisons (inspired by Beowulf fighting underwater).

Some sort of super attack that fatigues you maybe, at high levels (inflicting condition like stunned, not just "more damage").

None of the other Monster Manuals ever got added to the SRD (with the exception of a couple of monsters from Monster Manual 2).

Specifically the razor boar and scorpionfolk (they're in a special OGC appendix at the back of the book rather than alphabetically with the other monsters).

"A weapon for murdering worlds" = probably the Eoxian weapon that blew up the Twins to create the Diaspora.

Yeah, to kill Pharasma permanently you might have to eliminate death from the universe.

Or (as Set says) maybe her powers and role might pass immediately to someone else.

I thought a gorgon was the race of Medusa?

Outside D&D and things derived from D&D, yes.

But somehow Gygax decided that it was a metal-skinned bull with a breath weapon. (I think they got mixed up somehow with the catoblepas, and maybe the fire-breathing bronze bulls -- the khalkotauri Snorter mentions.)

I kind of doubt there will be mecha. Numeria isn't all-tech-all-the-time, I think robots are fairly rare even there, and the Gearsmen are pretty recent IIRC... and most of the tech is controlled by the Technic League who are pretty secretive, right?

Isn't most of Numeria more Conan type barbarian society?