Evolution is something I would not think too hard about in RPG's
RPG's and fantasy novels use earth animals because readers immediately know what a lion, fox, or eagle is. That is the sole reason. Because making up a new ecology would either confuse people, lose cultural touchstones that the author wants to maintain, or take more time to describe.
In reality, they way life on Earth evolved not merely simple selection, but also required large amounts of luck, and worked on a backdrop of specific changes in geography and climate that an alien world would probably never perfectly replicate. Evolution is a mindless process that doesn't have some sort of set end goal, and while you might get things that roughly fill the niche of say a fox or deer, they would not be the same animals.
In game, I just assume the vault builders + Elder Things just terraformed Golarion with earth life that had evolved on our planet, and that the fauna/flora is relatively recent there.
Okay, she violates evolution. Whatever.Calistria violates everything. Such is her way.
Only when she does so, no one thinks of it as a violation. She's that good at it.
Let's just say I'm pretty religious in certain regards.
Ok...I have a question...what exactly is so evil about the Sarenae 'warmongers' of Qudira?
They...from what I gather...want to invade Taldor to free the nation that prescutes their religion...what is so wrong about this?
Also they would be freeing the country from the decadent rule of the nobility.
Taldor needs to be set on a path of redemption...the only way to do that is by removing the forces that keep the country in it's decadenent and Imperialistic past. The only way to do that...unfortunaly is with war.
There is really nothing Evil with their aims...I don't neccessarily agree with it...as I would perfer to see these changes coming from a more natural internal methods...but sometimes war is neccessary.
Now of course there might be followers of Sarenae who see things differently...but that does not mean one side is Good and one side is Evil. Good can and should come into conflict with each other...not as much as evil does...but it can occur.
Also being a cleric does not mean your free will or ability to choose your path is over ridden and you become some robot to be programed by your your god or goddess. They are many poaths to God after all.
What you need to do is steal Ken Hite's Axis of Design for Pathfinder, with an added color set for gods interactions.
The alignment one can be handled by Black and White with Blue adding how strange the world is (are robots strange once we have dragons and flumps?).
But just one more for how often the higher powers get involved. So you have one end where the gods are literally patching their doctrine on a month by month basis, with things like:
Cayden Cailean: Hey everybody, I got drunk and decided that Jack the slave trader really is a bastard, get'im.
To the other end where they grant spells but don't show up to talk or answer at all.
There's one factor of evolution that nobody seems to have mentioned: timetable. Last I checked, the actual age of Golarion has never been stated. Furthermore, we have multiple conflicting and ambiguous creation myths. Lastly, we have all sorts of magical meddling going on. The evolution question is misapplied in a world where humans were originally the aquatic servants of a race of evil alien fish. The aboleth and the given history of humanity on Golarion indicate that evolution bears no weight here. That's not to say that Golarion and evolution are mutually exclusive, but the problem is likely much more convoluted, even more so than it is on Earth. We still haven't really figured out evolution here.*
Also, it's very interesting that humans evidently didn't have a patron deity until Aroden ascended.
*I'm talking specifics. There's still confusion as to the ancestry of humans, and we still only have relatively rough sketches of evolution on a massive timescale.
On the Sarenite Schism topic, there are many more followers of Sarenrae than there are clerics of Sarenrae. That, in and of itself, allows for a whole lotta confusion. Human error is not an insignificant consideration. I'm fond of the idea of Norgober waging a cold war on Sarenrae by secretly empowering those who are way off base, fomenting unrest, and generally being a troll amongst the gods.
Dammit missed my window: Here's the example of the axis of design:
http://www.rpglibrary.org/utils/wild_talents_axes/
|
I'm fond of the idea of Norgober waging a cold war on Sarenrae by secretly empowering those who are way off base, fomenting unrest, and generally being a troll amongst the gods.
And, in addition to Norbooger, there's an entire Archdevil, Geryon, who has encouraging heresies as his job in life.
He and his followers may not have their fingers in *every* case of worshippers of god X 'getting it wrong,' but, unless he's stone-cold incompetent (and Asmodeus doesn't keep incompetent help around, if ya know what I mean...), he's involved in at least some of them.
'Burners' of Iomedae who persecute and even execute native folk on flimsy pretexts that they might be more susceptible to collaboration with demons? Slavery-supporting Sarenraens? Misogynistic Erastili? Racial supremacist Findeladlarans? Toragites who come to value gold and territory and 'security' more than the lives of their non-dwarven neighbors?
Geryon blushes and says, 'I never!'
This devil is very much in the details and finds ambiguous holy texts to be fertile ground for his wicked seeds.
|
Magic is like science. Just because we can now insert fish genes into tomatoes or grow meat outside of an animal doesn't mean that evolution stopped working.
Some ecological protestors recently attempted to expose current research on this issue, but were caught in the act before they could get away with the evidence.
It appears they walked into a hambush.
Dinosaurs survived earthfall (shouldn't it be Golarionfall?) because they are just cool like that.
But seriously, I have thught about this question long and hard, and after much investigation and introspection, I fall back on something Gary Gygax wrote (under a pseudonym) in the very first issue of Dragon Magazine:
"In the infinity of cosmic probabilities there stretches an endless succession of earths, this one being but one of the possible realities. Those in close proximity to our world are but little different from it, but countless alternatives to history exist, and as these co-worlds become more removed from this plane of reality so their resemblance becomes removed. There are, then, worlds which are gloriously superior to ours, some which are horribly worse, but most are merely different in some way. Far from our probability line is a world called by its inhabitants Oerth. It is very similar to this earth in many ways, but it is also quite different..."
All D&D(RPG) worlds are reflections of each other. At some point, 'in the beginning', there was probably one True World (which was probably the entirety of the Prime material plane back then). For whatever reason, this First world was shattered into a million 'echoes' of itself. It isn't so much parallel evolution, as it is all these worlds starting with the same building blocks. Add-in all the cross-contamination of planeswalking magi and world-hopping tecnopunks, gods and planer portals, etc, and you have a recipe for a constant influx of other-worldy creature types and their attendant DNA. In the end, everything is constantly heading in the same direction, albeit some slower or faster then others.
As for dinosaurs, with all that magic floating around, is it so hard to conceive of a few surviving somehow, or even being 'brought back' by some mad mage?
On the dinosaurs note, that's not terribly difficult. Earthfall didn't kill everything. It was (relatively) contained. Tian Xia wasn't affected by it. Dinosaurs are found in the most northern reaches of the planet, as far north as the Crown of the World and in the Tusk Mountains in the Realm of the Mammoth Lords. It's likely that they simply didn't feel the effects as much or at all that far away.
|
Been doing some reading on some of the most problematic creatures in my mind. Dinosaurs. And the answer I've found makes a lot of sense. They're creations of the Vault Masters, Deep Tolguth being their place of origin. How come dinosaurs haven't evolved on Golarion? They're only just showin' up on the surface now, and any evolution they had prior to that was in the controlled environment of their Vault.
Clever stuff!
|
We don't even know when life started on Golarion. There could have happened like this:
Before Rovagug - Evolution goes as normal. Vault Builder profecies show the end of the world, vaults are built.
Lavos... i mean... Rovagug arrives - The end of the world, the gods fight over Golarion, very few life survives, Rovagug is imprisioned.
After Rovagug - Life begin anew, millions of years of evolution until age of serpents, serpent folk bring some dinossaur to golarion surface to act as servants
Before Earthfall - Dinossaur thrive outside of civilization after being freed by end of serpent folk empire.
Earthfall - Both dinossaurs and normal animal are near extinct, surviving species are only found in remote regions.
Today - Dinossaur eat adventurers. END !
And while the gods are nigh omniscient, they're not neccessarily immune to making big mistakes.
This is something I think a lot of people forget to take into consideration. Several points in my homebrew are due to divine mistakes or misjudgements (sometimes due to passion of the moment sometimes due to simply being new to godhood and sometimes from simply lacking forethought).
I'm fond of the idea of Norgober waging a cold war on Sarenrae by secretly empowering those who are way off base, fomenting unrest, and generally being a troll amongst the gods.And, in addition to Norbooger, there's an entire Archdevil, Geryon, who has encouraging heresies as his job in life.
He and his followers may not have their fingers in *every* case of worshippers of god X 'getting it wrong,' but, unless he's stone-cold incompetent (and Asmodeus doesn't keep incompetent help around, if ya know what I mean...), he's involved in at least some of them.
'Burners' of Iomedae who persecute and even execute native folk on flimsy pretexts that they might be more susceptible to collaboration with demons? Slavery-supporting Sarenraens? Misogynistic Erastili? Racial supremacist Findeladlarans? Toragites who come to value gold and territory and 'security' more than the lives of their non-dwarven neighbors?
Geryon blushes and says, 'I never!'
This devil is very much in the details and finds ambiguous holy texts to be fertile ground for his wicked seeds.
Hey now, he just points out what the gods really could have meant when they passed that piece of ill-conceived drivel they call a holy text out. I mean really it's not like it's hard to write out iron clad rules or what not. And these are GODS we are talking about... or at least they claim to be... you really want to follow someone that can't be bothered to even give you concise clear instructions?
|
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Hey now, he just points out what the gods really could have meant when they passed that piece of ill-conceived drivel they call a holy text out. I mean really it's not like it's hard to write out iron clad rules or what not. And these are GODS we are talking about... or at least they claim to be... you really want to follow someone that can't be bothered to even give you concise clear instructions?
Preaching to the choir, brother. I mean, really, these 'gods' have literally superhuman intellect and insight and persuasive ability, and, again, literally, centuries, if not *millennia* to get this stuff right.
Logically, there can only be 'loopholes' or 'misunderstandings' or 'heresies' if the gods *intended* for such things to happen, most likely to test and challenge their own faithful, strengthen and evolve their own holy tenets and weed out fair-weather-faithful and nincompoops who keep missing the point anyway.
So, when Geryon encourages a bunch of gullible Iomedans to burn the heck out of some swarthy native folk, 'just in case' they might be demon sympathizers, and then oh-so-incidentally help themselves to those native folks lands and livestock and whatnot, as payment for their righteous services in keeping the land safe from demon-cults, he's just doing Iomedae a huge favor, by helping her identify which of her followers are just a weensy bit off-message and need perhaps a bit of a gentle nudge back onto the right and proper course.
This sort of silliness could be avoided if Iomedae had just accepted Asmodeus' *more than generous* offer to write up her holy canon for her, to eliminate any potential for misunderstanding.