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I can’t quite remember which one it was, but i’m pretty sure the manumission of slaves in absalom did get a couple printed paragraph’s in a lost omens book.

Also you have to keep in mind, these events didn’t happen in a vacuum and all likely rippled out and effected each other. In fact think it was also stated in a lost omens book that cheliax’s recent abolition-in-name-only was an attempt to shore up their abyssmal international standing now that emancipation was taking around the inner sea, after it had already taken a significant blows after events like Ravounel and Vidrian seceding , to the point Andoran was smelling political blood in the water.

Plus changes like this can often happen in quick succession in our own world, with many european powers all banning chattel slavery in quick succession, as well as the way jewish emancipation swept across much europe across only a handful of years. Both events occurring in the early to mid 1800’s, which puts Golarion culturally in a pretty good spot culturally to have it’s own liberatory wave.

I see this comment a lot, and I always struggle with it. Because this IS a game, and the players deserve to be rewarded for game mastery and their own skill at getting better at all elements of playing an RPG. Metagaming is, to me, proof that your players are engaged in the game, and rather than fight against it, I try to roll with it and encourage it. It vastly helps if your players are able to manage player vs. character knowledge, and the Recall Knowledge is your best tool against things like this when it does come up. Have the player make a check to Recall Knowledge on the topic and if they succeed, their character can act on that knowledge. If they fail, they can't. The character can do things the player can't, after all, so the reverse is fair play! And since you, the GM, get to set the DCs for these things, you can control whether or not it's easy or hard for a PC to succeed (but I strongly recommend against setting the DCs to something they could NEVER achieve; that's not fair and is a waste of time—just tell the player their character can't do that and maybe suggest alternates).

Honestly, handling metagaming like this ends up being so much more fun for everyone, especially for groups that have played to together a lot or otherwise a lot of built up trust.

My favorite personal anecdotes of 'reverse metagaming' like you mentioned has always been from a shadowrun game i ran almost a decade ago, where I got to see one of my long-time players have an startled realization that his character couldn't understand an npc that was speaking a language the he actually knew in real life. He was grinning ear-to-ear by the time it all clicked for him and afterward not once did he use that player knowledge for his own in-character benefit, only using it improve the dramatic irony of every scene the two shared together.

Being able to give your players that kind of trust can only ever make a game better in my opinion.

While it might be useful for an academic grouping while trying to explain the development of world religion as a whole, I think “abrahamic” often runs into the exact same pitfalls as “judeo-christian”, especially within this particular conversation.

Honestly, that’s what seems most likely to me too.

Also, with War of the Immortals shaking up the deific/planar part of the setting, I think changing the name might give more of an opportunity to flesh out the lore for the apocalypse riders by expanding the roster outside the scope of the big 4 as more and more daemons take advantage of the chaos like szuriel is doing.

What I mean is that in 1960, some 60% of Americans attended a church regularly. Many more irregularly. So when D&D gets published in the 70s, all but a tiny percentage of the country were very familiar with Judeo-Christian references. Just saying "demon" or "devil" was enough to set an expectation. You didn't have to educate people as to what they were. Abrahamic names - and creatures based to a greater or lesser degree on preconceptions of those names - were a way of bringing a bit of familiarity to a strange world.

** spoiler omitted **

I don't think it's particularly correct to frame golems as part of some kind shared "Judeo-Christian" cultural heritage. It's main point of origin is a 16th century story that is very specifically about the centuries long precariousness of Jewish ghetto life across Europe and West Asia. In fact, Christians are only involved in the story insofar as they were the ones orchestrating a pogrom.

The idea wasn't widely known outside of the jewish community until well after that, when Marry Shelly used it as inspiration for Frankenstein and popularized the concept. Which is how the concept eventually entered into the zeitgeist of science fiction/fantasy all leading pretty directly to it's use in DnD and from there everywhere else.

For reasons like this "Judeo-Christian" has come to be seen as both inaccurate and, as far as Jews are concerned, pretty disrespectful and supercessionist. While there is some distant shared lineage in the sense that Christianity was founded on Roman interpretations of Jewish texts and the writings of a Jewish messianic cult during the Roman occupation of Judea, they were always distinct cultural traditions and have only gotten more distant in the intervening 2000 years.

Even where the cultures do seem to overlap, Jewish and Christian conceptions of those elements are often wildly different to the point illegibility. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Hell, being sorted in an afterlife by your spiritual allegiance, The Devil, humanoid angels with the capability of free will and thus to rebel, all of these concepts are entirely and pretty exclusively christian. The Golem, Dybbuk, Kabbalah, etc are not only exclusively Jewish in origin, but originate so far after the beginnings of Christianity as to render even the argument of shared cultural custody moot.

It is ok to just say Christian when you mean Christian.

JiCi wrote:

They renamed golems to "also avoid religious references".

I assume it's the same here...

Frankly I'm a little frustrated by that one. Why do other cultures get all sorts of creatures and stories represented in Golarion but not Jewish culture?* They could've just brought them more in line with the actual folklore rather than removing the name entirely.

* Heck, it does feel weird to me that while there are parallels with all sorts of cultures and religions from real life there's no Jewish analogue at all on Golarion. Like we have religions loosely themed on Christianity and Islam, at least in aesthetics, so why not Judaism?
(And yes there are creatures vaguely inspired by Jewish apocrypha, but almost all of them are things that are carried over into Christian or Muslim stories as well)

Honestly, I think a lot of that is down to the core inspirations of the pulpy fantasy and weird fiction that led to DnD and then later pathfinder. A number of foundational authors in those genres happened to be white supremacists/proto-nazis (Lovecraft,Bulwer-Letton, and such) and in a number of incredibly influential cases based the fantasy settings of their novels on their personal visions of an alternate hyperborean white pagan(ish) europe ‘de-judaized’ of almost all jewish cultural influence. which in this case also happened to include christianity, due to the way it (as well as a handful of other imperial religions) were founded on appropriated jewish texts and customs.

You can still see some of the legacy of this weird dynamic in DnD’s oft-remarked on oddly ‘christian-feeling’ polytheism. something that pathfinder has been doing a great job of expanding past by including more genuinely representative animistic and polytheistic practice while also maintaining the consistency of their setting and what both the folks at paizo and others love about it. (would never tell anyone to get rid of Desna and the bunch over all this, love those goobers, great charcters)

But regardless, it has still lead to a lot of reflexive racism (including antisemitism) seeping into a lot of early fantasy and weird fiction, the early tabletop games and settings inspired by them, and the hobby around them that folks have slowly been trying to course correct on for quite a while.

Notice how the only real elements of jewish culture that generally exist in ‘DnD style fantasy’ are monsters, treasure, or scraps of decontextualized kabbalic imagery. Things like renaming a lichs’ soul cage so it doesn’t use the greek word for a sacred jewish ritual object and making it so players don’t fight a creature, named after a folktale about being an (admittedly imperfect) divinely imbued guardian against the violence of more than couple thousand years worth of blood libel, in nearly every adventure path, go a long way.

So it especially makes sense that, like a lot of other peoples and cultures that haven’t gotten proper or respectful representation in fantasy settings over the decades, there aren’t many respectful human ‘jewish cultural analogues’ in pulp fantasy settings, tabletop or otherwise.

I will say, whenever James Jacobs, or Luis Loza, or whoever at paizo inevitably gets to bring a more respectful version of golems back to paizo (I mean the golem’s got it after all) that they also find a respectful cultural home for them befitting their culture of origin.

Wouldn't that same language allow a bomber to use one action to draw and strike with their field vial bomb, but Quick Bomber says "You Interact to draw a bomb, draw a versatile vial, or use Quick Alchemy to create a bomb, then Strike with the bomb." So, it looks pretty confirmed that versatile vials are a thing you draw when you want to use them.

Actually it's only optional to put versatile vials in your Alchemist’s Toolkit. So the language in Quick Bomber would allows you to perform a 1 action throw Versatile Vials regardless of if you have them in your toolkit or not.

Or IF you have your toolkit at all (if it’s stolen, you’re captured, or you have to remove it for whatever reason) because the remastered Alchemist regenerates Versatile Vials regardless of the presence or absence of your Alchemist’s Toolkit after all. Which would give that verbiage on Quick Bomber it’s own (very very specific) niche under this rules interpretation allowing you to still perform a 1 action strike with Versatile Vials even if disarmed of your toolkit or having not store them in it.

(sidenote, I’ve gotta admit I kind of love how the new Alchemist enables the fantasy of a captured/jailed alchemist with enough time scrounging for supplies and building a small handful of makeshift improvised bombs/vials. It’s just fun.)

boxgirlprestige wrote:

Just something I noticed while looking at the some of videos showing off new alchemist details but… does the language in the versatile vials description that says “you can store all your versatile vials within your alchemists toolkit” technically allow you to “draw and replace (your field vials) as part of the action that uses them” as per the alchemist toolkit description?

They are used as the old Infused Reagents for Quick Alchemy were: directly from the Kit.

For Quick Alchemy, yes. but wouldn’t that same language technically allow a toxicologist to use 1 action to draw and apply their field vial poison, as well as a churigeon or mutagenist to to spend 1 action to draw and drink their own field vial elixirs?