Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting (errata / DM Reference)

[James Jacobs]

Charles Evans 25 wrote:

Which deities did the Azlanti worship in the days of their empire?

Slight Pathfinder #39 spoiler:

Spoiler:

We list several of the deities worshiped in the old days of the Azlanti city of Saventh-Yhi, but this is far from the full list.

Since we haven't really done much with Azlanti's culture (since the focus of most of what we're doing with Golarion is aimed at the Inner Sea region and not Azlant), we haven't actually published a full list of deities who were worshiped in Azlant. Apart from the spoiler above, we don't have many plans to explore this anytime soon. What I can say for sure, though, is that Pharasma is the oldest deity in the current pantheon (with Rovagug coming in second, and then probably Desna in third place) and that there were no dwarves in Azlant so that meant no Torag. There were certainly other deities that are now long gone as well.

Charles Evans 25 wrote:

On a slightly easier note (and I think I may have asked this before, but have restricted computer access time now, so can't check) are people in current day Golarion generally aware that the aboleths caused the Earthfall, or is it viewed as an accident/some sort of divine punishment on the Azlanti?

(To some extent, I would suspect that deities would clear up any misinterpretations that divine intervention was involved, or at least shoot down false claims/attempts to 'take the credit' that particular faiths were involved.)

People aren't generally aware that Earthfall was caused by the aboleths. In fact, people on Golarion aren't generally aware that aboleths even exist. Of those who DO know about Earthfall, they generally associate it with the age of Darkness and assume it was divine punishment or some other event that they hope never happens again.

As for the deities clearing up misinterpretations... nope. Deities don't do that. Unlike Paizo employees, they're not interested in explaining things to the people. Note how spells like commune, divination, and contact other plane are all so evasive in their results—this is directly because deities do NOT directly communicate with mortals. They work in mysterious ways, and its pretty much up to their faiths to interpret what their deities want, what is the truth, and what's going on.

[Charles Evans 25]

So if, for example, a prominent, powerful, priestess of Calistria starts claiming that the Age of Darkness was brought about by Calistria as a super-act of vengeance on Azlant for an offence against Calistria, and that unless the heathens start doing x, y, and z, then Calistria is going to smite the world with a new Age of Darkness, in which only the faithful will be spared (citing the way the elves avoided Earthfall can be spun to support this tale of salvation of the faithful in a crisis), then the other deities won't stir themselves to put their faithful right on the issue and would be happy to let a major piece of propaganda like that go uncontested?
Calistria having an interest in vengeance, it seems to me that this is a halfway credible story, and that since Calistria's interests include trickery too the goddess herself won't start stripping a cleric of her powers for going round starting spinning this sort of deceit...

[James Jacobs]

Charles Evans 25 wrote:

So if, for example, a prominent, powerful, priestess of Calistria starts claiming that the Age of Darkness was brought about by Calistria as a super-act of vengeance on Azlant for an offence against Calistria, and that unless the heathens start doing x, y, and z, then Calistria is going to smite the world with a new Age of Darkness, in which only the faithful will be spared (citing the way the elves avoided Earthfall can be spun to support this tale of salvation of the faithful in a crisis), then the other deities won't stir themselves to put their faithful right on the issue and would be happy to let a major piece of propaganda like that go uncontested?

Calistria having an interest in vengeance, it seems to me that this is a halfway credible story, and that since Calistria's interests include trickery too the goddess herself won't start stripping a cleric of her powers for going round starting spinning this sort of deceit...

Nope; they would not. Of course, said priestess of Calistria would be very hard-pressed to find legitimate support for her claims, both in print and in prayer, and would likely be counted as a heretic by her brothers and sisters and if she KEPT to her beliefs in an overly public way she'd likely start finding others start to regard her as crazy or worse. But she's certainly still acting within the teachings of her goddess so she'd still get spells and retain her cleric abilities, thus giving her words at least some measure of support. The result: An interesting NPC, which is always a good thing.

[Charles Evans 25]

It's not Golarion specific, but an interesting discussion's started on another thread about how much an 'in game' bestiary might cost, and what text-copying spells, printing press options, etc, might be available.
(*Link*)
Golarion specifically, I'll ask here, do illustrations have to be drawn by hand for a published work, or can wood-cut images be produced (or even something more sophisticated)?
It's said in various places that the Pathfinder Society occasionally produces 'best of' selections from journals of members for public consumption (or at least not if quite 'best of', then at least whatever suits the Decemvirate's current goals/objectives); are these illustrated, or are they page after page of text?

[Charles Evans 25]

I'm cross-posting a couple of posts here from the 'Ask James Jacobs' thread, which might come in useful for future reference purposes:

James Jacobs wrote:

Charles Evans 25 wrote:

James Jacobs:

I note upthread you stated pretty firmly that Aroden's dead. If Aroden's dead then why isn't Rovagug? Rovagug has a much bigger list of enemies, I'm reasonably sure, and Aroden's being dead makes it clear that it is possible to inhume (or whatever the appropriate term would be) deities with extreme prejudice.
Or do Sarenrae and Asmodeus who beat Rovagug down and jailed him have some scheme to 'redeem' (or at least convert to a less chaotic point of view) Rovagug, and so won't let anyone interested in killing him anywhere near him?

Rovagug is QUITE a bit more powerful than Aroden. He's powerful enough that it took a whole team of deities led by Sarenrae to defeat and imprison him; if they COULD have killed him, they would have. They couldn't, so they locked him up.

Looking at it another way... Aroden was a god for only a few thousand years, if that. Rovagug may have been a god longer than the Material Plane even existed.

Not all deities are equally powerful, in other words. Some are vastly more powerful than others.

James Jacobs wrote:

Charles Evans 25 wrote:

If Rovagug is more powerful than regular deities, and seems to follow different rules/concerns to some extent, is Rovagug actually a deity or something else altogether like an incredibly old primal force of the universe? Whilst Rovagug has worshippers and grants clerics spells/powers as if he were a deity, there are other things already established in canon (archdevils and empyreal lords for example) capable of doing just that despite their lack of deific-ness.

From a pragmatic point of view, if Rovagug is something other than a deity, it would save on the headaches of establishing some sort of greater/lesser/demi deity scheme that the 'vastly more powerful' invites, and the inevitable arguements/flamewars somewhere down the road by posters over why their personal favourite deity has been assigned a lower rank than they think that their deity merits... ;)
Edit:
Hmm, the really wild/outrageous idea just occured to me of is Rovagug a member/aspect of a group lovecraftian mythos entities????

Before we can accurately map out how powerful deities are in relation to each other, we need rules to map out deity powers and stats. And before we can do THAT, we need rules for how things work between that and the core game—rules, in other words, for epic level content (level 21st to whatever).

We're at LEAST 2 years away from an epic level book, and probably more than that. And that means that I have no idea how far away we are from a deity-level book—6 years? A decade?

Until then, we can't responsibly rank the deities, and we don't WANT to. Think of deities as galaxies. Some galaxies dwarf other galaxies, but when compared to a human, they're all so immense that it really doesn't make a difference to us how big they are.

So while some deities are more powerful than others, it's really not all that important to actually sit down and rank them. Especially since, if we do, that could very well limit our options in the future once we know more about what we're talking about.
Also: Archdevils and empyreal lords and the like are demigods, which is a subcategory of deity. The only REAL difference between the two is that if and when we do epic level rules, those of the demigod level are the ones we'd stat up. The others, not so much.
In any case, Rovagug isn't one of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones. He's more likely to be a really REALLY powerful qlippoth lord.