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Hi, is there any lore established on whether or not wish can restore a soul that’s been destroyed or is that more of a rules decision left for a dm to decide.
The less wish (or similar spells) can do, the less interesting they get. But since they're also so open-ended, that's among the many things that we leave to GMs to decide. And that decision doesn't have to be the same across all campaigns, even those run by the same GM, since where the wish comes from can be different as well.
That said, having a wish restore a soul that's destroyed is both a cool story plot point (for a monster or NPC) as long as you don't do it too much (aka more than once), and super useful if it's a PC soul that got destroyed and the player still wants to play that character.
Hello again Mr. Jacobs!
If / when Rovagug breaks free of the Dead Vault, would he devour everything including the Abyss, and then himself? Or would he only devour that which "mortals" or non-Quippoloths have built?
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Hello again Mr. Jacobs!
If / when Rovagug breaks free of the Dead Vault, would he devour everything including the Abyss, and then himself? Or would he only devour that which "mortals" or non-Quippoloths have built?
Unknown, but it's not likely to end well for non-Rovagug folks.
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In 2nd Edition, do insectoid werecreatures/entothropes still use belladonna instead of wolfsbane to cure their affliction?
We haven't made a decision on that yet since we haven't officially brought them into 2nd edition yet as far as I know. You can generally assume that lore from 1st edition holds fast for things though unless we specifically change it, and since we haven't here, then no change yet.
In 2nd Edition, do insectoid werecreatures/entothropes still use belladonna instead of wolfsbane to cure their affliction?We haven't made a decision on that yet since we haven't officially brought them into 2nd edition yet as far as I know. You can generally assume that lore from 1st edition holds fast for things though unless we specifically change it, and since we haven't here, then no change yet.
Are there insectoid werecreatures in Pathfinder? I thought there are only eight types of lycanthropes: werebats, werebears, wereboars, werecrocodiles, wererats, weresharks, weretigers, and werewolves.
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Are there insectoid werecreatures in Pathfinder? I thought there are only eight types of lycanthropes: werebats, werebears, wereboars, werecrocodiles, wererats, weresharks, weretigers, and werewolves.In 2nd Edition, do insectoid werecreatures/entothropes still use belladonna instead of wolfsbane to cure their affliction?We haven't made a decision on that yet since we haven't officially brought them into 2nd edition yet as far as I know. You can generally assume that lore from 1st edition holds fast for things though unless we specifically change it, and since we haven't here, then no change yet.
We introduced the aforementioned entothropes in Bestiary 6 for 1st edition. So... yes there are.
And they're templates, so there's technically as many versions as you want there to be, not just the example ones we provided.
Do people in Lost Omens find it hard to differentiate a boggard from a grippli, since they look very alike? At least I definitely have trouble telling them apart just by looking the arts.
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Do people in Lost Omens find it hard to differentiate a boggard from a grippli, since they look very alike? At least I definitely have trouble telling them apart just by looking the arts.
They dont' look alike at all. Grippli are slim and slender and aren't always green (and when they are it's bright green). Boggards are thick and squat and have lots of sharp teeth and are always a muddy green. That said... not every artist gets the details 100% right each time, and we don't have the luxury each time of quality controlling the art when it clashes with the publication schedule, so yeah, there's some slippage between the two artistically now and then, alas.
There's also the fact that boggards are Medium sized and gripplis are small.
And also the fact that they tend to live in different parts of the world.
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I have always assumed that all types of cave worms are aquatic creatures because they have a swim speed. But recently I found out that, while azure worms have amphibious trait, crimson worms and purple worms don't. Is it a typo? Can crimson worms and purple worms breathe in water?
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So Aroden was LN, but was often followed by LG creatures (Iomedae, Araxni) Did he also have LE followers? How did Iomedae feel about these followers? How did they feel about her?
He probalby did have LE followers, and Iomedae would not like them and would regard the fact that Aroden allowed them or even encouraged them as a flaw and a mistake. Much of her becoming a deity was "I see what Aroden did and I can do better."
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I have always assumed that all types of cave worms are aquatic creatures because they have a swim speed. But recently I found out that, while azure worms have amphibious trait, crimson worms and purple worms don't. Is it a typo? Can crimson worms and purple worms breathe in water?
Just because you can swim doesn't make you aquatic or live in water. Look at snakes for an example.
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Hey James,
Earlier, you mentioned creating undead being problematic because it locks quintessence out of the cycle of souls. Is that true of mindless undead like zombies as well, or just intelligent undead like vampires?
It's true of creating all undead, but less so when it comes to zombies and skeletons.
If the cycle of souls is a river, think of creating minor unded as throwing a rock into the river. Doesn't really block the flow of the river... unless you do it so much that eventually it causes change.
Creating intelligent undead is more like building a dam across the river... or more like scooping the water out and storing it somewhere that it can't get back into the planet's water cycle.
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That's what I thought - this should help with world building, thanks!
Oh, almost forgot to ask another question as per the rules of the thread. Do quintessence golems from 1e bestiary 6 also serve as "dams" in the river of souls?
Nope. Quintessence is part of the cycle, whether it's in a construct or just making up the material of the Outer Planes.
I heard that a hexagon-based map is much better than a square-based map. Which do you prefer? Do you think it would have been better if Pathfinder RPG (both First and Second Edition) is based on hexagons instead of squares?
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I heard that a hexagon-based map is much better than a square-based map. Which do you prefer? Do you think it would have been better if Pathfinder RPG (both First and Second Edition) is based on hexagons instead of squares?
I prefer hexagons (or no grid at all) for wilderness maps. I prefer squares for maps featuring buildings and structures, because it's easier and more visually appealing to line walls up to a square grid than it is to wrestle with hexagonal grids.
I don't think it would have been better if Pathfinder was based on hexagons.
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I'm a little confused. How is it that quintessence locked in a vampire serves as a dam in the river while quintessence locked in a quintessence golem doesn't? What am I missing?
Quintessence doesn't get locked in a vampire. That's a corrupted soul. It never even got the chance to become quintessence.
Quintessence doesn't enter into the picture at all for undead. It's the end result of the soul's journey. And the beginning of a new soul's creation. It's also not something that has any real capacity at agency or growth or creation or a greater purpose. When someone makes a golem out of quintessence, you're not robbing the quintessence of its destiny, because quintessence, like gravel or mud or magma or diamond or whatever doesn't have a fate or destiny or greater purpose other than just being material.
Put another way, turning a soul undead is a complete and utter invasion of one's self, while making a quintessence golem is just playing with lego. (Up until you animate it, that is, where if you're an awful person you take the shortcut and enslave a spirit/soul in there and are just as bad. That's not the mindless golem's fault though.)
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From above post, "where if you're an awful person you take the shortcut and enslave a spirit/soul in there and are just as bad."
What if the magic user contracts freely and openly with the animating spirit? Does that count, or would it be fine since it's contracting honestly?
Example:
"Hello, open call for a spirit of earth to inhabit this vessel under these listed conditions, service to end upon destruction of the vessel. By my standards, this is intended as a very long-term contract, but if your standards of time differ, I may be in error. The major catch is, once you inhabit the vessel, short of someone destroying it, there's no going back."
Some creatures like amphisbaenas, ettins, hydras, jotund trolls, and tarn linnorms have more than one heads. Do they have more than one souls? I ask this because I'm not sure if I can regenerate an ettin's severed head via regenerate spell or not (let's assume this ettin is still alive and its another head is intact). Should I use raise dead or similar spells to heal an ettin's severed head?
When the decision was made to start Paizo's own setting, what was the process for building Golarion as we know it?
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From above post, "where if you're an awful person you take the shortcut and enslave a spirit/soul in there and are just as bad."
What if the magic user contracts freely and openly with the animating spirit? Does that count, or would it be fine since it's contracting honestly?
Example:
"Hello, open call for a spirit of earth to inhabit this vessel under these listed conditions, service to end upon destruction of the vessel. By my standards, this is intended as a very long-term contract, but if your standards of time differ, I may be in error. The major catch is, once you inhabit the vessel, short of someone destroying it, there's no going back."
Getting consent from a soul or spirit to be used in a golem is not the same as enslaving a spirit or soul, so that's an entirely different topic that isn't covered under my description of awful above. ;-)
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Some creatures like amphisbaenas, ettins, hydras, jotund trolls, and tarn linnorms have more than one heads. Do they have more than one souls? I ask this because I'm not sure if I can regenerate an ettin's severed head via regenerate spell or not (let's assume this ettin is still alive and its another head is intact). Should I use raise dead or similar spells to heal an ettin's severed head?
They have one soul.
If a multiheaded creature has a head lopped off, the lopped off head is like a fingernail or a clump of hair. You can use it as an element to bring back a dead creature if that spell or effect requires a body part, but as long as the creature itself is alive, it doesn't need to be raised from the dead. Regenerate or those effects must be cast on a creature, and they'd restore the missing head normally. The game doesn't include an element where you can cast regenerate on a body part and grow an entirely different creature.
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When the decision was made to start Paizo's own setting, what was the process for building Golarion as we know it?
If you write an adventure, you have to set it somewhere. You need proper nouns for the elements in the story. So, even if you aren't building a setting to support it, you're still creating a setting by what you put into that adventure.
When we lost the license to work on D&D magazines, we also lost the ability to build content for Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, and so on. We wanted to continue doing adventures using the 3.5 SRD, but there's no real world content or setting content to draw upon there apart from the implications of settings implied by the types of monsters and equipment in there—hardly enough to hang an entire series of Adventure Paths on.
So we built Golarion. At first, it was a dual thing, with myself (and Wes Schneider and James Sutter) building Varisia for the Adventure Paths, and Erik & Jason and others building other parts of the world that would then incorporate Varisia in. The very first published "campaign setting" book we did would be the Rise of the Runelords Player's Guide, which is less about preparing you for that adventure and more about giving context to all the proper nouns in Varisia (and in time, Golarion).
The process for building it was a bunch of us coming together to brainstorm ideas and then hiring freelancers to expand upon those ideas over and over and over. Large portions of the stuff you see in the first several Adventure Paths (up through Serpent's Skull) include plots and regions drawn from my homebrew setting though, since I'd been working on that setting since the late 80s, and thus was able to save a LOT of time in the area of building up lore and names and histories and deities and all that.
Getting consent from a soul or spirit to be used in a golem is not the same as enslaving a spirit or soul, so that's an entirely different topic that isn't covered under my description of awful above. ;-)
I was mostly asking because of that nasty, "no going back" bit.
Let us say some party has (correctly) determined that a particular small settlement/city block had a WHOLE LOT of active and festering evils in it. Which (demi)god would be most amenable to the plan of,
1) quietly evacuate the few remaining innocent
2) burn the rest to the ground, butcher what remains
3) make sure to relocate the innocent from step 1, so they don't suffer.
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Getting consent from a soul or spirit to be used in a golem is not the same as enslaving a spirit or soul, so that's an entirely different topic that isn't covered under my description of awful above. ;-)I was mostly asking because of that nasty, "no going back" bit.
Let us say some party has (correctly) determined that a particular small settlement/city block had a WHOLE LOT of active and festering evils in it. Which (demi)god would be most amenable to the plan of,
1) quietly evacuate the few remaining innocent
2) burn the rest to the ground, butcher what remains
3) make sure to relocate the innocent from step 1, so they don't suffer.
Not sure where you're getting a "nasty no going back" bit from that post, unless it's just my conversational internet posting tone not carrying over in the way I intended.
We have literally hundreds of faiths in the setting, and MANY of them will be interested in dealing with your hypothetical city block. And which ones would be interested would vary from region to region. Note that I use the word "faiths" there, because deities and demigods don't normally get that involved in mortal affairs. That's wha their worshipers are for and all about.
So all that in mind, I'll assume that the small settlmeent/city block is somewhere in Avistan, and pick only one faith for each that would be appropriate—there are certainly others that would be into these rules, but these three are the first that came into mind.
1) Calistria
2) Gorum
3) Sarenrae
Not sure where you're getting a "nasty no going back" bit from that post, unless it's just my conversational internet posting tone not carrying over in the way I intended.
1) Calistria
2) Gorum
3) Sarenrae
The no going back bit was part of the premise of my original question, 2 questions ago. Because the nature of the deal would in and of itself make those changes.
As for that list, I was thinking more of "All of the Above, In Order" not "each option individually." Reposting the question for clarity:
Let us say some party has (correctly) determined that a particular small settlement/city block had a WHOLE LOT of active and festering evils in it. Which (demi)god would be most amenable to the plan of,
1) quietly evacuate the few remaining innocent
2) burn the rest to the ground, butcher what remains
3) make sure to relocate the innocent from step 1, so they don't suffer.
Is there a minor or major faith that would do all three of those, and not only one or two?
On page 235 of Second Edition Bestiary, it says that a dark and sinister power capable of rendering even the most beautiful merfolk into a degenerate and mutated wretch, and that the merfolk are unwitting puppets to some unknown entity lurking in the deepest depths of the seas. What are the dark and sinister entity mentioned here? Alghollthus, perhaps? And can they truly do such things?
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Not sure where you're getting a "nasty no going back" bit from that post, unless it's just my conversational internet posting tone not carrying over in the way I intended.
1) Calistria
2) Gorum
3) SarenraeThe no going back bit was part of the premise of my original question, 2 questions ago. Because the nature of the deal would in and of itself make those changes.
As for that list, I was thinking more of "All of the Above, In Order" not "each option individually." Reposting the question for clarity:
Let us say some party has (correctly) determined that a particular small settlement/city block had a WHOLE LOT of active and festering evils in it. Which (demi)god would be most amenable to the plan of,
1) quietly evacuate the few remaining innocent
2) burn the rest to the ground, butcher what remains
3) make sure to relocate the innocent from step 1, so they don't suffer.
Is there a minor or major faith that would do all three of those, and not only one or two?
I have no idea then. In part because this feels a little bit like I'm being baited into saying a good-aligned deity would be into butchering things.
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So earlier you mentioned that few good aligned creatures would become undead willingly because it removes souls from the cycle, meaning the outer planes erode faster without the reinforcement those souls might have otherwise provided. But here it seems like the consent is the big issue, and the evil comes in by violating free will. So is becoming an undead creature willingly actually a bad thing?
In most cases, yes. Not in every case, and those exceptions gain narrative value and weight BECAUSE they're exceptions. The more often they happen, the more they cheapen and erode those themes.
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On page 235 of Second Edition Bestiary, it says that a dark and sinister power capable of rendering even the most beautiful merfolk into a degenerate and mutated wretch, and that the merfolk are unwitting puppets to some unknown entity lurking in the deepest depths of the seas. What are the dark and sinister entity mentioned here? Alghollthus, perhaps? And can they truly do such things?
That's the aboleths and their ilk. We're trying to hide plot points and secret story elements, I guess.
I have no idea then. In part because this feels a little bit like I'm being baited into saying a good-aligned deity would be into butchering things.Not sure where you're getting a "nasty no going back" bit from that post, unless it's just my conversational internet posting tone not carrying over in the way I intended.
1) Calistria
2) Gorum
3) SarenraeThe no going back bit was part of the premise of my original question, 2 questions ago. Because the nature of the deal would in and of itself make those changes.
As for that list, I was thinking more of "All of the Above, In Order" not "each option individually." Reposting the question for clarity:
Let us say some party has (correctly) determined that a particular small settlement/city block had a WHOLE LOT of active and festering evils in it. Which (demi)god would be most amenable to the plan of,
1) quietly evacuate the few remaining innocent
2) burn the rest to the ground, butcher what remains
3) make sure to relocate the innocent from step 1, so they don't suffer.
Is there a minor or major faith that would do all three of those, and not only one or two?
I should probably mention that I was expressly saying "active" and "festering" evils, and meant to imply fiend/undead-level threats. And was wondering if there existed any who'd be for that, regardless of alignment. (Only GOOD ones I could think of, from just vague memories of reading divine rules, would have been Torag/Ragathiel from PF 1e, and even they felt a little off for that - hence my asking). And was overstating step 2 a little.
I recognize there's a thin line between what I meant and what you saw, but I was trying to distinctly be on the other side of it with steps 1 and 3, not the side you feared. Sorry for the wrong impression there.
____________
Question: Which region of Golarion would you say has the most insidious evils in it, that has been revealed?
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Question: Which region of Golarion would you say has the most insidious evils in it, that has been revealed?
Probably Taldor, or maybe Andoran or Five Kings Mountains. Somewhere you wouldn't think evil would be, but it is, because that's kinda what insidious implies. Hidden and sneaky and dangerous.
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Makes sense.
Out of curiosity, I saw daemonic became a language in the transition to 2e, although it's not on any of the common or uncommon language tables. Is it just rarer for mortals to learn daemonic vs abyssal or infernal?
It should be included in the list of languages in the back of the Bestiary, along with several others like Requian and Aboleth. They're uncommon. We didn't include them in the Core Rulebook because we had limited space in some cases, and in others hadn't yet invented the languages.
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How come Kingmaker Anniversary Edition, Kingmaker Bestiary, and Kingmaker Companion Guide still have not been released? I thought they were to be released in 2021. Why did you choose to delay their publication?
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Some information in Wrath of the Righteous (adventure path, not video game) suggests that Demons can force a soul to be CE. Does Demonic possession change change the target's alignment? What about rituals to send a soul to the Abyss? Can an unwilling soul go straight to the abyss without Pharasma's judgement? Is this part of the natural cycle, or is the Abyss getting more than its "fair" share? Do clerics of Pharasma oppose demons more than other beings?
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How come Kingmaker Anniversary Edition, Kingmaker Bestiary, and Kingmaker Companion Guide still have not been released? I thought they were to be released in 2021. Why did you choose to delay their publication?
Because a pandemic changed the reality of a lot of things, and because producing over 1,200 additional pages above and beyond our regular schedule was a bit too aspirational a task for is even BEFORE you factor in a global disaster like the pandemic.
AKA: We didn't choose to delay their publication. Fate did.
Keep in mind that Pathfinder is a game that depended on in-person gatherings, and for a few years those have been dangerous, so we've had to make a lot of last-minute scrambles to adjust, ranging from changing how we offer things, transitioning toward a stronger focus on supporting virtual table tops, switching from an in-office model to a work-from-home model, dealing with one crisis after the other (not the least of which after the actual pandemic is the devastating disruption to shipping)...
...and on top of all that, every single employee at Paizo has been struggling with these events while at the same time trying to do our jobs.
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Some information in Wrath of the Righteous (adventure path, not video game) suggests that Demons can force a soul to be CE. Does Demonic possession change change the target's alignment? What about rituals to send a soul to the Abyss? Can an unwilling soul go straight to the abyss without Pharasma's judgement? Is this part of the natural cycle, or is the Abyss getting more than its "fair" share? Do clerics of Pharasma oppose demons more than other beings?
Demons are all about causing mortals to sin—aka become chaotic evil so that when they die their souls go to the Abyss and make more demons.
They have a LOT of tools in there to do that, and yes, some of the rarer and more awful and more powerful of them can consign someone to the Abyss. It's not part of the "natural" cycle, but it's not something that Pharasma's faith puts a primary "fight against" marker on. It's more of a second tier worry, I guess, because the soul still goes on to the afterlife, even if it's not where it should go. Remember, Pharasma is neither lawful nor good, so justice for this sort of thing is irrelevant in many ways as long as the end result—soul goes on to become a petitioner—takes place.