I'm not anywhere near knowing all of the PF hisory.
But i would like to know, was the starfall natural, or was it influenced by anybody/anything?
As far as I know there's nothing official written about it other than in the Numeria section of the Inner Sea World Guide. But given that Starfall probably derives its name from the crashed alien spaceship (Silver Mount), I'd guess it's decidedly UNnatural.
This would be a great question to Ask James Jacobs.
It's been stated that there are several theories in-world about what caused Starfall, and they all point to unnatural causes.
RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32
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Did you mean Earthfall? The impact when the Starstone crashed onto Golarion causing a planetwide cataylsm? An asteroid pulled from space by the aboleth to destroy Azlant?
Did you mean Earthfall? The impact when the Starstone crashed onto Golarion causing a planetwide cataylsm? An asteroid pulled from space by the aboleth to destroy Azlant?
Thats it.
I think it was unnatural, but the aboliths definitely claim to have done it whether they did or not :P
Greg
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It becomes confusing when Paizo uses Starfall to mean a crashed spaceship and to use it interchangeable with Earthfall.
Have we been mislead? A meteor hit the Azanti, but also in Inner Sea and if you look at the Varisian Gulf. It does say in one of the books that some people believe that more than one meteor hit the world. So maybe the Aboleths had nothing to do with it.
Alot of loose strings. It allows the GM to make his world different than someone elses, by which one the GM decides is true.
"In preemptive retaliation for their disloyalty, the aboleths looked to the stars, uniting in an unspeakable ritual that brought a shower of great stones tumbling from space. The resulting catastrophe shattered the island of Azlant, wiping out its people and creating a ruin-laden maze of crumbling sea canyons where once a mighty empire had stood." (Inner Sea World Guide p211)
Aroden later brings the Starstone up from the depths of the Inner Sea and founds Absalom to bring in the Age of Enthronement (Inner Sea World Guide p35), so I think it's fair to assume that the Earthfall event's epicentre was near the current location of Absalom. The impact created the Inner Sea but was also powerful enough to sink most of Azlant and fragment the rest.
Just to clarify, Starfall is the name of the capital city of Numeria (a barbarian country filled with super-futuristic artifacts located in the northern central regions of Avistan, the continent that most of Pathfinder takes place within), while Earthfall () is the cataclysm () in which the Star Stone (now found in the city of Absalom which was created by Aroden when he ended the Age of Darkness) crashed into the earth caused by the Aboleths for the purpose of destroying their arrogant creation Azlant (an empire made of superior human stock originally "uplifted" by the Aboleths). It... didn't go well for the Aboleths either.
Here's a Map for the curious and perhaps to get a better idea of the world's locations.
Avistan is the northern continent, while Garund is the southern one.
Anyway, the name confusion is inevitable given the similarity of nomenclature for (presumably) unrelated things, but I figured a bunch of links to the relevant materials for each of them might help.
In short, it doesn't matter if you're talking about the Silver Mount of Numeria, or the Test of the Starstone, it's definitely unnatural, in some regard.
There are many questions about when Silver Mount hit Numeria, and it could have been at the same time as Earthfall (perhaps because the Aboleth magic was potent enough it pulled a passing ship from orbit), but from my readings it seems more likely that it occurred sometime within the Age of Darkness.
Reference the position of Azlant v. the Inner Sea (where Aroden found the Star Stone), two other suggestions/thoughts include: perhaps it's due either to the original meteor being broken up upon entry (and the Star Stone is just what survived), or perhaps it literally "bounced" and was deflected off of whatever magical wards ancient Azlant had... still causing untold destruction, but deflecting the actual stone into a side-path, causing it to carve a deep rift and thus create the Inner Sea. Or perhaps both! Or perhaps it was a summoning of many smaller meteors, too! We don't know for sure, and it's great for GMs ().
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Reference the position of Azlant v. the Inner Sea (where Aroden found the Star Stone), two other suggestions/thoughts include: perhaps it's due either to the original meteor being broken up upon entry (and the Star Stone is just what survived), or perhaps it literally "bounced" and was deflected off of whatever magical wards ancient Azlant had... still causing untold destruction, but deflecting the actual stone into a side-path, causing it to carve a deep rift and thus create the Inner Sea. Or perhaps both! Or perhaps it was a summoning of many smaller meteors, too! We don't know for sure, and it's great for GMs (as mentioned by Star Shadow! I have original ideas, I swear! :D).
As I referenced before, the Inner Sea World Guide does actually speak of "a shower of great stones tumbling from space" (ISWG 211). Whether this shower tracked east to west or west to east we don't know, but presumably the path of the fall streatched from Azlant to what is now Absalom. They must have been pretty huge rocks to split apart a continant and open up the Inner Sea. Whether the Starstone was unique or whether each rock has the same properties but only one of them was actually dredged up remains unknown.
Which is actually a pretty scary thought.
Because, you know, the Aboleths are down there. And they have no problem with the depths...
My thought on the deflection, however, comes from the fact that the Inner Sea didn't used to exist, Azlant is west of it, and the Inner Sea just looks like Garund and Avistan were ripped into two pieces to create it. Thus the Starstone could have simple come from that direction.
According to James Jacobs:
Is the Starstone's ability to make mortals into gods an intrinsic part of the stone, or was it something that happened due to the magic used by the Aboleths who called it down to Golarion?Whatever gave the starstone that power, it had nothing to do with aboleth magic. The starstone already had that power in space; the fact that the aboleths pulled it out of the sky along with all the rest of the space rocks is coincidence... an ironic coincidence, considering the depths of aboleth atheism and disdain for the divine and hatred of faith.
So the aboleths called down many meteorites which made up Earthfall, among which the Starstone is unique in its powers.
Ah! Thanks!
James Jacobs clarified in his Q/A thread that there is only one Starstone, and it was something the Aboleth had no foreknowledge of and accidentally pulled down to Golarion. It was this miscalculation that caused disaster for the Aboleth too (in the irony of ironies that a ferociously athiestic race was devastated by a god-empowering space monolith).
There are, however (as stated in Distant Worlds), shards of the starstone in orbit around Golarion that have mystical properties as well. However, anyone attempting to go get them finds space twisting and changing in their presence and bizarre alien creatures appearing out of nothingness.