The final destination of all souls on Golarion...oblivion?

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.

I mean, your description isn't exactly wrong, but it's coming from a very specific place and whether it's accurate sort of depends on one's point of view.

The souls that dissolve don't generally do so until they're ready to on the Good planes (all sorts of s$+~ can happen on the non-Good ones, but that's rather the point), and go on to become one with the plane. Becoming one with the plane that epitomizes one's highest ideals isn't exactly oblivion by most reasonable definitions. It's the end of that individual, certainly, but many real world religious beliefs hold out the eventual loss of identity in a way very much like this as a good thing (Buddhism leaps immediately to mind).

On a practical level, since this only happens on Good planes when a soul is tired of existence, wouldn't it be more horrifying if there wasn't some way out of an existence grown utterly stale? Looked at as a choice, even if it's a form of death (which is, again, a matter of perspective) don't some people have the right to make that choice?

Really, it all depends on how you look at it.

IIRC, the vast majority of petitioners have zero memories of their mortal life. What melds into the plane is not really your PC, even if it is their soul.

The very rare petitioners who keep their mortal identity seem to be acknowledged as exceptional and raised to a higher degree of power.

That said, since PCs are often considered exceptional individuals, you could take a page from the Immortals box and decide that the whole PC party meets and adventures again as high level Celestials, Monitors and/or Fiends.

Note also that the final destination of all souls on Golarion, through the cycle of life and death, is to be eternally recycled.

Maybe not that bad after all.

Traditionally, through the cycles of reality, the implication is that yes, eventually all souls grind down to zero and then reality resets, but there's been events that have thrown "tradition" and "prophecy" and the like into doubt, with the onset of the Age of Lost Omens where things like prophecy started going bad, Aroden died, the Eye of Abendego started, and lots of other things resulted from a shift in cosmic certainty and fate and all that.

This entry of the Windsong Testaments goes into the myth of this event to a certain extent.

Whatever the cause of the change in fate and destiny and prophecy and all that at the onset of the Age of Lost Omens (which is itself a metagame metaphor for "now, for the first time in all incarnations of reality, player characters are a part of the equation and thus anything is truly possible"), the point of it is that what the future holds for anything in Golarion, be it the outcome of your next adventure, the fate of your next character, or the eventuality of where things go from here on a total metaphysical level that includes all of the multiverse, is for the first time in the setting, truly unknown.

OH and another thing.

Sometimes, rarely, a creature that dies does retain its memories. This is a specific plot point in a few of our Adventure Paths, particularly "Hell's Rebels."

What happens to a PC that dies, including whether or not they retain their memories after being judged and are ascended to whatever comes next, is all up to the GM who (if they're a good GM) weighs the desires of the character's player in mind when making the decision.

But we very much wanted to make the setting for Pathfinder one where, just as in the real world, death is frightening and not something to aspire to. It's supposed to be scary. A world where death isn't scary is so alien that it'd have to be the primary focus of a game and everything else would be incidental—this would not only require a vastly different campaign setting, but a vastly different game than Pathfinder.

We also wanted to avoid setting something up where some players would see death as a "free upgrade" for their character, since that's what you're essentially talking about if your PC dies, then is reborn with their memories (and thus their class levels and all other things experience grants them) in a more powerful body like an angel or a demon than a mortal body. That's not a theme we wanted to make attractive for play in Pathfinder.

OH and another thing.

Sometimes, rarely, a creature that dies does retain its memories. This is a specific plot point in a few of our Adventure Paths, particularly "Hell's Rebels."

What happens to a PC that dies, including whether or not they retain their memories after being judged and are ascended to whatever comes next, is all up to the GM who (if they're a good GM) weighs the desires of the character's player in mind when making the decision.

But we very much wanted to make the setting for Pathfinder one where, just as in the real world, death is frightening and not something to aspire to. It's supposed to be scary. A world where death isn't scary is so alien that it'd have to be the primary focus of a game and everything else would be incidental—this would not only require a vastly different campaign setting, but a vastly different game than Pathfinder.

We also wanted to avoid setting something up where some players would see death as a "free upgrade" for their character, since that's what you're essentially talking about if your PC dies, then is reborn with their memories (and thus their class levels and all other things experience grants them) in a more powerful body like an angel or a demon than a mortal body. That's not a theme we wanted to make attractive for play in Pathfinder.

its sounds like that clashes a lot with your goal of making pharasma non-evil and non-scary

also if that is the goal why did you made death almost required for the world itself to work?

if the only thing you gain in all that is that your alignment plane gets a boost in a war that will likely never end and will have no winners then evil people should become a undead specially a lich 100% of the time this world has no rewards for you whatsoever as if i care whether abaddon will get a extra patch of rock

To be fair, ArchSage, there are outsiders that have canonically lived for tens of thousands of years.

So becoming a lich vs becoming an outsider is something of a toss up on how long you'd continue to exist... especially since becoming a demilich is probably a more horrifying fate overall.

I mean, your description isn't exactly wrong, but it's coming from a very specific place and whether it's accurate sort of depends on one's point of view.

The souls that dissolve don't generally do so until they're ready to on the Good planes (all sorts of s~@% can happen on the non-Good ones, but that's rather the point), and go on to become one with the plane. Becoming one with the plane that epitomizes one's highest ideals isn't exactly oblivion by most reasonable definitions. It's the end of that individual, certainly, but many real world religious beliefs hold out the eventual loss of identity in a way very much like this as a good thing (Buddhism leaps immediately to mind).

On a practical level, since this only happens on Good planes when a soul is tired of existence, wouldn't it be more horrifying if there wasn't some way out of an existence grown utterly stale? Looked at as a choice, even if it's a form of death (which is, again, a matter of perspective) don't some people have the right to make that choice?

Really, it all depends on how you look at it.

This. If you want to see a good example of this action, try watching the final season of THe Good Place. Actually, do it anyway, because that show is great.

Deadmanwalking wrote:

I mean, your description isn't exactly wrong, but it's coming from a very specific place and whether it's accurate sort of depends on one's point of view.

The souls that dissolve don't generally do so until they're ready to on the Good planes (all sorts of s~@% can happen on the non-Good ones, but that's rather the point), and go on to become one with the plane. Becoming one with the plane that epitomizes one's highest ideals isn't exactly oblivion by most reasonable definitions. It's the end of that individual, certainly, but many real world religious beliefs hold out the eventual loss of identity in a way very much like this as a good thing (Buddhism leaps immediately to mind).

On a practical level, since this only happens on Good planes when a soul is tired of existence, wouldn't it be more horrifying if there wasn't some way out of an existence grown utterly stale? Looked at as a choice, even if it's a form of death (which is, again, a matter of perspective) don't some people have the right to make that choice?

Really, it all depends on how you look at it.

This. If you want to see a good example of this action, try watching the final season of THe Good Place. Actually, do it anyway, because that show is great.

... but watch the other seasons first :)

IIRC, the vast majority of petitioners have zero memories of their mortal life. What melds into the plane is not really your PC, even if it is their soul.

If you lose everything when you die, then you don't experience an afterlife, as that's a different being, so you are free to trade your soul to devils etc with no consequences. Unless you are one of the very unkucky few that do remember and Paizo write an adventure about you.

The Raven black wrote:

IIRC, the vast majority of petitioners have zero memories of their mortal life. What melds into the plane is not really your PC, even if it is their soul.

If you lose everything when you die, then you don't experience an afterlife, as that's a different being, so you are free to trade your soul to devils etc with no consequences. Unless you are one of the very unkucky few that do remember and Paizo write an adventure about you.

This is not correct. One can, in real life, argue how much of one's personality is based on specific memories, but in Golarion's cosmology there are definitive indicators that most of one's personality and drives are contained in the soul irrespective of memories because there are lots of examples of souls continuing to behave, in broad strokes, as they did prior to losing memories afterwards.

So no, the person you're screwing over by doing this is recognizably you, even if they do lose their memories.

Captain Morgan wrote:

Deadmanwalking wrote:

I mean, your description isn't exactly wrong, but it's coming from a very specific place and whether it's accurate sort of depends on one's point of view.

The souls that dissolve don't generally do so until they're ready to on the Good planes (all sorts of s~@% can happen on the non-Good ones, but that's rather the point), and go on to become one with the plane. Becoming one with the plane that epitomizes one's highest ideals isn't exactly oblivion by most reasonable definitions. It's the end of that individual, certainly, but many real world religious beliefs hold out the eventual loss of identity in a way very much like this as a good thing (Buddhism leaps immediately to mind).

On a practical level, since this only happens on Good planes when a soul is tired of existence, wouldn't it be more horrifying if there wasn't some way out of an existence grown utterly stale? Looked at as a choice, even if it's a form of death (which is, again, a matter of perspective) don't some people have the right to make that choice?

Really, it all depends on how you look at it.

This. If you want to see a good example of this action, try watching the final season of THe Good Place. Actually, do it anyway, because that show is great.

... but watch the other seasons first :)

The Good Place has a little wrinkle at the end with it.

its sounds like that clashes a lot with your goal of making pharasma non-evil and non-scary

also if that is the goal why did you made death almost required for the world itself to work?

if the only thing you gain in all that is that your alignment plane gets a boost in a war that will likely never end and will have no winners then evil people should become a undead specially a lich 100% of the time this world has no rewards for you whatsoever as if i care whether abaddon will get a extra patch of rock

Most people actually have no idea of what awaits them in such long terms in the Afterlife. They may eventually fade into quintessence and feed their patron's (or alignment's) realm with renewed life, or they may pass some sort of afterlife test and become Outsiders (the A-types of good realms, the D-types of evil realms, or whatever else.)

Abaddon is more likely to get an extra patch of Daemon Poo anyway, since that's the fate of most Hunted. :P

Moppy wrote:

The Raven black wrote:

IIRC, the vast majority of petitioners have zero memories of their mortal life. What melds into the plane is not really your PC, even if it is their soul.

If you lose everything when you die, then you don't experience an afterlife, as that's a different being, so you are free to trade your soul to devils etc with no consequences. Unless you are one of the very unkucky few that do remember and Paizo write an adventure about you.

This is not correct. One can, in real life, argue how much of one's personality is based on specific memories, but in Golarion's cosmology there are definitive indicators that most of one's personality and drives are contained in the soul irrespective of memories because there are lots of examples of souls continuing to behave, in broad strokes, as they did prior to losing memories afterwards.

So no, the person you're screwing over by doing this is recognizably you, even if they do lose their memories.

In which lore book is this explained? I haven't seen that (yet) except in the case of undead and the rare individuals that get to star in an adventure or become demon lords.

I mean, eventually the real universe seems likely to end up as an undifferentiated sludge of neutral pions, so "eventually the maelstrom is going to consume the other planes" doesn't seem like that much of an issue.

In which lore book is this explained? I haven't seen that (yet) except in the case of undead and the rare individuals that get to star in an adventure or become demon lords.

It's mentioned a few places, but more importantly it's inherent in their Alignment remaining the same. That's definitely personality, and it's definitely stable between mortal and post-mortal existence.

As someone that believes in neither reincarnation nor any afterlife, my body is gonna be broken down and fed into the land where I become a part of everything else.

Like, it always surprised me when people dislike a fictional afterlife not being good enough because right now, we have no guarantees. Plenty of beliefs have an afterlife where you have no memories or identity. There are plenty where the afterlife is not paradise.

I guess it just seems like looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Changing the afterlife cosmology is one of the easier things to do for your home games, as it has little relevance to the mechanics of the game.

But honestly, I think there is a cosmic benefit to good aligned people vs evil aligned. In the never ending feud of good and evil, good wants to save as much as they can. Pharasma, despite being neutral, is trying to stop the multiverse from ending because...well it sucks that everything is going to stop existing.

Souls somehow power the cycle and stave off the universe's end. We don't really know how or why, but do know they are connected.

We know Pharasma is the only survivor from the previous universe, and she has prepared her daughter for the same role for the next multiverse with whatever "spark of creation" is necessary to start the whole thing over, perhaps with improvements.

Perhaps one day souls will not be needed to keep the multiverse running.

All that aside many religions include the annihilation of the self in a recognizable form as part of the idea of the afterlife.

One of the original ideas of the Jewish afterlife was not the modern Christian ideation of Heaven (which many Jews now share) but that instead the soul went back to a sort of primordial soul well in which your soul juice mixed with the juice of all the other souls and was ladled into a new body for a new existence. You ceased to be you, but you were apart of a larger body of things. You were an important part of the process of existence.

If this horrifies you, it is likely because the concept of you as an individual is something you cannot picture surrendering to the world. Which could be for many reasons, but perhaps because you've never framed it within the context of providing the necessary fuel for the next one to come.

Yeah, I am not sure how someone could frame this as Pharasma being evil.

As for scary, only in the way that powerful beings who rule over things we have very little knowledge or control over is scary. She is certainly not Abaddon scary.

Yeah, I am not sure how someone could frame this as Pharasma being evil.

As for scary, only in the way that powerful beings who rule over things we have very little knowledge or control over is scary. She is certainly not Abaddon scary.

Alignments can be interpreted in all sorts of ways, as the internet has endless examples.

I don't see Pharasma as evil. Nor do I see her as good. Her not being good does not mean she's evil though.

As for scary...I don't think I ever said that I wanted Pharasma to be non-scary. In fact, some of the most interesting elements to me about her are the scary elements.

A large percentage of people in the real world live with the belief that when they die they go onto instant oblivion, and a subset of those aren't particularly worried about the idea of oblivion after death.

I have spoken to many people who said they actually hope there is oblivion after death rather than some kind of eternal afterlife.

Dissolution or oblivion isn't scary to everyone.

A large percentage of people in the real world live with the belief that when they die they go onto instant oblivion, and a subset of those aren't particularly worried about the idea of oblivion after death.

I have spoken to many people who said they actually hope there is oblivion after death rather than some kind of eternal afterlife.

Dissolution or oblivion isn't scary to everyone.

Yeah, I have one family member who is adamant with her appreciation of a confirmed oblivion post mortem.

Yet I'm of the complete opposite view. Regardless of biological death I want my "spiritual" existence to continue as long as possible, very preferably with my memories and personality intact, even better if it outlives this universe to the next and furthermore (assuming the Big Crunch ending, which sadly seems lesser and lesser possible the more the scientists delve in Universe Lore).

Doesn't the Windsong Testament mentioned mean that all of the gods (including Pharisma) will die eventually as well (other than the Survivor?)

Doesn't the Windsong Testament mentioned mean that all of the gods (including Pharisma) will die eventually as well (other than the Survivor?)

Yeah, that was my understanding as well. But I believe they are supposed to be in-world legends/myths/stories, so it's possible they're wrong or don't have the whole story!

I'm still wondering how all of the various manasaputras fall into that (their lore, which may well be more legend than truth, suggests the highest among them are multiverses old, in contrast to Pharasma being the sold Survivor of the previous multiverse).

Moppy wrote:

In which lore book is this explained? I haven't seen that (yet) except in the case of undead and the rare individuals that get to star in an adventure or become demon lords.

It's mentioned a few places, but more importantly it's inherent in their Alignment remaining the same. That's definitely personality, and it's definitely stable between mortal and post-mortal existence.

I don't understand the logic about alignment being applied here. Clearly, there is something that continues, but the question is whether mortal you is aware of it. A book reference would be very helpful.

A large percentage of people in the real world live with the belief that when they die they go onto instant oblivion, and a subset of those aren't particularly worried about the idea of oblivion after death.

I have spoken to many people who said they actually hope there is oblivion after death rather than some kind of eternal afterlife.

Dissolution or oblivion isn't scary to everyone.

Yup, I'm one of those people that hopes for oblivion. The idea of eternity, be it an eternity of good or bad, is scary to me. Golarion's afterlife would probably be my ideal afterlife, honestly.

We know Pharasma is the only survivor from the previous universe, and she has prepared her daughter for the same role for the next multiverse with whatever "spark of creation" is necessary to start the whole thing over, perhaps with improvements.

can on tell me where that daughter part is from?

that only makes even more evil in my eyes because essentially it means everyone will just be erased and forgotten but her legacy lone is allowed to continue which i find horribly hypocritical and i would rather go out of my to ensure the multiverse ends permanently

Archsage's viewpoints don't really have any kind of moral consistency to them. Just don't worry about it.

And yeah, the manasaputras have always just been weeeeird.

Archsage's viewpoints don't really have any kind of moral consistency to them. Just don't worry about it.

And yeah, the manasaputras have always just been weeeeird.

Are they even in Golarion? I don't think I've seen them in any APs, and I don't think any were published in B6.

that only makes even more evil in my eyes because essentially it means everyone will just be erased and forgotten but her legacy lone is allowed to continue which i find horribly hypocritical and i would rather go out of my to ensure the multiverse ends permanently

What makes you think it is a choice she is making beyond doing the best she can within limited power to ensure as many people as possible can live safely.

She has some control as a god, but nothing suggests she set the laws in place and it is quite clear that gods are from omniscient in PF.

In some traditions, primarily eastern, it's not necessarily evil to end the cycle of universal creation and destruction. The concept of existence and nothingness has a different meaning to them.

For them destruction can mean attaining a state of formlessness, from which a new universe "unrelated" (using the western meaning) to the previous can arise - in this case instead of Pharasma continuing and overseeing a reboot, Pharasma goes away and something else happens. This new thing might be "nothing", but it's meaningless to speculate on in since the laws we use to talk about it are dissolved, however, they would see a continuity even if the individual "selfs" (remember this word has a very different meaning there) do not perceive it.

In a way, it's very similar to the "what happens when you die in Golarion" debate we are having but it's the other way around.

What's strange for me is that some people believe souls in Golarion have a continuity so even if you die and lose your memory you somehow still "remember", therefore selling your soul to Asmodeus is a BadThing, but for universes "dying" there is no continuity and "it's all over" means it's all over. Surely one's beliefs would align on both those 2 issues?

Claxon wrote:

We know Pharasma is the only survivor from the previous universe, and she has prepared her daughter for the same role for the next multiverse with whatever "spark of creation" is necessary to start the whole thing over, perhaps with improvements.

can on tell me where that daughter part is from?

that only makes even more evil in my eyes because essentially it means everyone will just be erased and forgotten but her legacy lone is allowed to continue which i find horribly hypocritical and i would rather go out of my to ensure the multiverse ends permanently

Well she has no control over the fact that the universe will end. And her "daughter" may or may not be her real daughter, as far as I can tell. The daughter is a psychopomp who is the chosen successor, probably for reasons we don't fully understand.

Honestly, choosing to permanently end the multiverse is possibly beyond Pharasma's capability. From lore that we have it seems Yog-Sothoth as the Watcher will always exist, and exists outside the multiverse. Pharasma was the Survivor from the previous incarnation of the universe, but didn't really remember anything from the previous existence. Though it seems like something persisted because she created everything and knew how to use the "foundation stone".

Choosing to end the cycle of creation seems like the real evil choice to me.

Edit: ArchSage you're making some really egregious assumptions that just don't make sense.

It seems unlikely that anyone except Pharasma can prepare the next universe, and she also has to be the penultimate survivor (prophecy) of the universe (Yog-Sothoth not counting) so there can be one survivor. For whatever reasons, she has chosen her daughter (who is also deity level power) to be that survivor. As a goddess of prophecy, she probably had her reasons to designate her specifically.

I don't think Pharasma CAUSES the multiverse to end (indeed, the story is called the Three Fears of Pharasma, suggesting she know's it will happen, and is afraid0 but can't do anything., and her fears have manifested as things like Rovagug.

I was going to weigh in yesterday about how I didn't see how pharasma being goddess of death and birth made her automatically evil just because death is meant to be a scary and uncertain thing in universe, but now I see I've not only missed the train but I don't even know where to begin unpacking the assumptions made here...

Let's talk about the setting Golarion is in for a second.

Cheliax, the political entity, is evil- the state religion is devil worship and everything. Individual people who happen to live in Cheliax because they were born there and relocating is not within their means, are basically decent. Some of them are evil and go on to prop up the state infrastructure of oppression, but more of them just stay farmers, craftspeople, laborers, etc.

Like if there's anywhere to lab test "people will slide easily and naturally towards villainy" it's Nidal, where not only is "sadistic torture" the mandated state religion, but it has been for thousands of years. Nonetheless, there are plenty of decent people in Nidal who mostly try to keep their heads down lest they end up as the object of ritual torture.

Fun fact: the six ancestries in the CRB are supposed to map to the 6 standard PC alignments- Dwarves tend towards LG, Gnomes tend towards NG, Elves tend towards CG, Halflings tend towards LN, Goblins tend towards CN, and Humans tend towards TN.