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Golarion is missing and the universe has forgotten everything that occurred during that period of time! And the Starfinder Society has dedicated themselves to tracking down lost lore from the Gap, deducing what happened during the missing years, and discovering what happened to Golarion.
Except they never will.
If the Starfinders ever succeed, the campaign hook will be over. So they're doomed to fail. Predestined. Their mission is impossible and plot and reality will always prevent the Starfinders from actually succeeding at their purpose. Instead, the best they can hope for is minor mysteries and local lore.
It's an endless quest. A little like Star Trek Voyager. Whenever an alien or anomaly or technology is introduced that can conceivably get them home sooner, you know for a fact the attempt will fail. Because if they succeed the show is over. There's less drama as there's no real chance of success.
The One Armed Mn won't be caught, Bruce Banner won't find a cure, the Professor won't get them rescued from the island, the couple will remain "won't they", etc.
The idea of a central mystery works. As does disassociating Starfinder from Golarion so the setting doesn't just focus on the world we already know rather than the new. And it's reminiscent of the death of Aroden in Golarion. But unlike the Starfinders, the primary purpose of the Pathfinder Society isn't to find out how Aroden died. The Pathfinders can succeed and advance their goal meaningfully. But by tying the Starfinders to the unsolvable central mystery, the group is rendered ineffectual. They can only have lesser successes at best, and at worst are presented as ineffectual failures who accomplish nothing.
Presumably since the Pathfinders in Golarion DO have other areas of interest besides Aroden's death, Starfinders will also have other things to do...(and hopefully suceed at.)
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People like solving mysteries. If you present someone with a puzzle that they know has no answer, they won't bother solving it.
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It will probably be like Aroden's death: Paizo will have the answer to the mystery (for continuity's sake), and some things will be hinted at in published material, but it won't be released. This is completely in line with their design philosophy, so that GMs have the freedom to use their own explanation or ignore it as desired in their own campaigns.
So, if a group hates having Rovagug cultists in their campaign, making the "official" answer that Rovagug was breaking free and the gods "hid" Golarion to protect the rest of reality (which is one speculation; similar to the story of The Snarl in the Order of the Stick) could potentially drive them away from Starfinder and also make the setting less "inclusive" of various elements; maybe the GM wants to focus the campaign around the Dark Tapestry/Dominion of the Black and the full manifestation of an Outer God.
Or maybe the Vogons just needed to build an intergalactic highway, so the gods moved Golarion somewhere else to protect it.
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People like solving mysteries. If you present someone with a puzzle that they know has no answer, they won't bother solving it.
Just because a mystery exists doesn't mean it can, or should, be solved.
Right, which is my point.
The primary purpose of the Starfinders is to solve a mystery that, by the nature of the campaign, cannot and should not be solved.Repeating my television analogy, its like having the Starfinders dedicated to getting Gilligan and the rest of the S. S. Minnow crew and passengers off the island.
Failure is assumed and mandated.
While the Starfinders can partially succeed for a time (acquiring minor but largely irrelevant or teasing clues) definitive progress will escape them. Inevitably, this means the Starfinders will become comically ineffectual as the fail again and again and a
gain.
Now, if the Starfinders were less about finding Golarion and more explorers out finding new routes across the galaxy, while also mapping the details of the Gap on a region-by-region basis then they can actually succeed. They're not total failures.
The Starfinders could find those new systems, they can discover the limits of the Gap. And when they discover new information on Golarion its a perk.
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And where has Paizo even confirmed that there will be a Starfinder Society, let alone declared that this is its "primary purpose"?And the Starfinder Society has dedicated themselves to tracking down lost lore from the Gap, deducing what happened during the missing years, and discovering what happened to Golarion.
Yeah, I haven't heard anything like this?
Assuming for a moment they exist and this will be their schtick though, you could say what's the point of the Pathfinder Society if they choose to investigate the Starstone Cathedral or Aroden's Death.
A mystery that has no answer isn't a very good mystery.
A mystery that hasn't been solved is a very good mystery.
I think "comically ineffectual" is too strong: In world there's no reason to think the mystery is unsolvable.
In world, there will be a whole bunch of attempts which yield only minor clues at best - but that's the nature of such mysteries. I would think big things like that are expected to take years and years and lots of effort to solve.
It's only when analysing a solve-the-mystery-expedition from a meta-perspective that one might think "It's not going to work, of course" but from a meta-perspective it isn't supposed to - which means it's not ineffectual.
I find the whole Aroden's-death-is-forever-going-to-be-a-mystery thing really, really irritating. This one doesn't bug me, for some reason (though maybe that's just because everything is a mystery at the moment). Fingers crossed I'll be able to make peace with Golarion's Inbuilt Conspiracy Theory machine.
I would also like to hear anything official about the Starfinder Society. Was that announced? Or is it just speculation that it might be?
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And where has Paizo even confirmed that there will be a Starfinder Society, let alone declared that this is its "primary purpose"?And the Starfinder Society has dedicated themselves to tracking down lost lore from the Gap, deducing what happened during the missing years, and discovering what happened to Golarion.
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Here. Mostly.And where has Paizo even confirmed that there will be a Starfinder Society, let alone declared that this is its "primary purpose"?And the Starfinder Society has dedicated themselves to tracking down lost lore from the Gap, deducing what happened during the missing years, and discovering what happened to Golarion.
Cheers.
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Here. Mostly.And where has Paizo even confirmed that there will be a Starfinder Society, let alone declared that this is its "primary purpose"?And the Starfinder Society has dedicated themselves to tracking down lost lore from the Gap, deducing what happened during the missing years, and discovering what happened to Golarion.
Plus the audio recording of the Starfinder Panel:
http://knowdirectionpodcast.com/2016/06/paizocon2016-seminar-002-starfinder /12 or so minutes in.
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I think "comically ineffectual" is too strong: In world there's no reason to think the mystery is unsolvable.
Except it is. Because, like the death of Aroden, they explicitly never want to reveal the answer.
It's only when analysing a solve-the-mystery-expedition from a meta-perspective that one might think "It's not going to work, of course" but from a meta-perspective it isn't supposed to - which means it's not ineffectual.
Which is great, as long as Starfinder gamers aren't ever meta...
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And it is not the case that they will never find out anything about the Gap. Information for an additional year or two in the past is certainly something that could be found in some distant solar system, as was already mentioned in at least one of the Paizocon seminars. Characters within the setting will celebrate such minor knowledge gains since they have no idea that they will never get the full answer.
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Or you could go the approach that solving the mystery reveals a hook to yet another mystery. Hard to pull off on a sustained basis, but cool if you can ppull it off.
Alternatively, groups solve the mystery . . . Problem is that they don't come up with the same solution . . . .
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Or you could go the approach that solving the mystery reveals a hook to yet another mystery. Hard to pull off on a sustained basis, but cool if you can ppull it off.
Alternatively, groups solve the mystery . . . Problem is that they don't come up with the same solution . . . .
Or solving the mystery means FINDING Golarion... at which point you can't get back to tell anyone what you discovered.
I think "comically ineffectual" is too strong: In world there's no reason to think the mystery is unsolvable.Except it is. Because, like the death of Aroden, they explicitly never want to reveal the answer.
In world.
Nobody in the Starfinder universe knows that.
Chief Technical Officer
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It's an endless quest. A little like Star Trek Voyager. Whenever an alien or anomaly or technology is introduced that can conceivably get them home sooner, you know for a fact the attempt will fail. Because if they succeed the show is over. There's less drama as there's no real chance of success.
The One Armed Mn won't be caught, Bruce Banner won't find a cure, the Professor won't get them rescued from the island, the couple will remain "won't they", etc.
I have no comment on the contextualization of this within Starfinder, but I'll just point out that there are plenty of people who like Star Trek: Voyager, The Fugitive, The Hulk, Gilligan's Island, and "will they/won't they" romance.
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It's an endless quest. A little like Star Trek Voyager. Whenever an alien or anomaly or technology is introduced that can conceivably get them home sooner, you know for a fact the attempt will fail. Because if they succeed the show is over. There's less drama as there's no real chance of success.
The One Armed Mn won't be caught, Bruce Banner won't find a cure, the Professor won't get them rescued from the island, the couple will remain "won't they", etc.
I have no comment on the contextualization of this within Starfinder, but I'll just point out that there are plenty of people who like Star Trek: Voyager, The Fugitive, The Hulk, Gilligan's Island, and "will they/won't they" romance.
Except that in almost all cases these stories end up reaching a point where contriving new ways to keep the central plot alive eventually makes the story tedious. There are very few cases like Lost where after resolving the primary plot point a new way to keep the mystery alive was found.
Not that I'm terribly concerned on that front. While I admit that I'd like to see some aspects of Golarion take their natural course and grow, I think on the whole Paizo does a fine job of moving the campaign setting forward while keeping certain things constant.
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It's an endless quest. A little like Star Trek Voyager. Whenever an alien or anomaly or technology is introduced that can conceivably get them home sooner, you know for a fact the attempt will fail. Because if they succeed the show is over. There's less drama as there's no real chance of success.
The One Armed Mn won't be caught, Bruce Banner won't find a cure, the Professor won't get them rescued from the island, the couple will remain "won't they", etc.
I have no comment on the contextualization of this within Starfinder, but I'll just point out that there are plenty of people who like Star Trek: Voyager, The Fugitive, The Hulk, Gilligan's Island, and "will they/won't they" romance.
The concern, which is legitimate, is 'But if we can't even do *anything* to change the outcome, why do we bother playing in the first place?'.
Several folks have mentioned here that just because the 'Big Question' isn't getting answered, there are lots of 'Small Questions' that still need exploring.
But if it boils down to 'Do this Sisyphean task' as the basis for a campaign, that's going to be a non-starter. Because no one wants to lose/not attain mission objectives every time they play.
It's an endless quest. A little like Star Trek Voyager. Whenever an alien or anomaly or technology is introduced that can conceivably get them home sooner, you know for a fact the attempt will fail. Because if they succeed the show is over. There's less drama as there's no real chance of success.
The One Armed Mn won't be caught, Bruce Banner won't find a cure, the Professor won't get them rescued from the island, the couple will remain "won't they", etc.
I have no comment on the contextualization of this within Starfinder, but I'll just point out that there are plenty of people who like Star Trek: Voyager, The Fugitive, The Hulk, Gilligan's Island, and "will they/won't they" romance.
The concern, which is legitimate, is 'But if we can't even do *anything* to change the outcome, why do we bother playing in the first place?'.
Several folks have mentioned here that just because the 'Big Question' isn't getting answered, there are lots of 'Small Questions' that still need exploring.
But if it boils down to 'Do this Sisyphean task' as the basis for a campaign, that's going to be a non-starter. Because no one wants to lose/not attain mission objectives every time they play.
Again I cite Lost. Adventurers don't necessarily need to fail to keep the mystery alive. Things could get quite interesting if in trying to solve one underlying question the adventure ends up presenting smaller solvable mysteries that pull people deeper into the plot.
"Never want to reveal the answer" and "not having an answer" are two very different things.
Gamers can be Meta, but characters aren't. They don't know they'll never be able to find Golarion again.
The outcome of both is identical in that they will never find Golarion. whether they know that or not.
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Just to clarify: Learning things about the Gap is only *one* of the Starfinders' missions. There are other aspects to what they do, all based around the core idea of exploring new worlds and sharing that information for the good of all.
Beyond that, I should probably hold my tongue until we're finished with development on those sections. :P
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Just to clarify: Learning things about the Gap is only *one* of the Starfinders' missions. There are other aspects to what they do, all based around the core idea of exploring new worlds and sharing that information for the good of all.
Beyond that, I should probably hold my tongue until we're finished with development on those sections. :P
Are they on a five year or continuing mission?
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I have no comment on the contextualization of this within Starfinder, but I'll just point out that there are plenty of people who like Star Trek: Voyager, The Fugitive, The Hulk, Gilligan's Island, and "will they/won't they" romance.It's an endless quest. A little like Star Trek Voyager. Whenever an alien or anomaly or technology is introduced that can conceivably get them home sooner, you know for a fact the attempt will fail. Because if they succeed the show is over. There's less drama as there's no real chance of success.
The One Armed Mn won't be caught, Bruce Banner won't find a cure, the Professor won't get them rescued from the island, the couple will remain "won't they", etc.
I like them too... for a time. Eventually, things can become forced.
It can work well in scripted dramas, where the question isn't "will this fail?" but "how?" and "when?"
But that doesn't translate to RPGs. If the script calls for Janeway to choose the Prime Directive over the way home then it works. But in the RPG the players might say "eh, Kirk broke the Prime Directive a dozen times. We'll just do it this one violation."
Removing the choice becomes a railroad. And not even a good one where there's an illusion of choice; the players have to fail because the ending is written.
Just to clarify: Learning things about the Gap is only *one* of the Starfinders' missions. There are other aspects to what they do, all based around the core idea of exploring new worlds and sharing that information for the good of all.
Beyond that, I should probably hold my tongue until we're finished with development on those sections. :P
Which is kinda why I'm posting. Not trying to be a dick.
Just popping in before things are finalized to say "hey... if you go Organized Play and have every Starfinder Society mission end in an auto-failure because the campaign can't answer the big mystery, people might get pissed."If finding out details of "The Gap" is, well, the Tertiary Directive of the Society then they can succeed more often than not and feel effectual, and the small (and largely irrelvant) mystery sustaining clues they unearth regarding the Gap are a bonus.
Just... food for thought.
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Just popping in before things are finalized to say "hey... if you go Organized Play and have every Starfinder Society mission end in an auto-failure because the campaign can't answer the big mystery, people might get pissed."
Can you point to a SINGLE PFS scenario, Pathfinder Module, or Adventure path in which the party fails because Aroden's death is still a mystery? And you'll find that Aroden's death is at most,an irrelevant background detail for Confirmation.
Thing is... yeah, maybe Golarion is in the Missing Persons category...but for the rest of the galaxy, life goes on... and new solvable problems are the order of the day.
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I find the whole Aroden's-death-is-forever-going-to-be-a-mystery thing really, really irritating. This one doesn't bug me, for some reason...
Spoiler from Starfinder AP #1: The PCs discover proof that Aroden traveled forward in time and died as a direct result of whatever events took place during the gap in history.
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Just popping in before things are finalized to say "hey... if you go Organized Play and have every Starfinder Society mission end in an auto-failure because the campaign can't answer the big mystery, people might get pissed."Can you point to a SINGLE PFS scenario, Pathfinder Module, or Adventure path in which the party fails because Aroden's death is still a mystery? And you'll find that Aroden's death is at most,an irrelevant background detail for Confirmation.
Thing is... yeah, maybe Golarion is in the Missing Persons category...but for the rest of the galaxy, life goes on... and new solvable problems are the order of the day.
Yeah, I highly, HIGHLY doubt that the APs (and/or scenarios if they do Organized Play) will revolve around trying to uncover the Gap. Like, at all.
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But that doesn't translate to RPGs. If the script calls for Janeway to choose the Prime Directive over the way home then it works. But in the RPG the players might say "eh, Kirk broke the Prime Directive a dozen times. We'll just do it this one violation."
It's very interesting to note that in-canon, Kirk wasn't nearly the 'cowboy' that the 'niche' cases that made the screen portrayed him to be.
He actually *couldn't* have lasted as a Captain very long (even on a five year voyage) if he'd been blatantly and hysterically violating the Directive every five seconds.
The more important part was *why* he broke it, and why it didn't always go well for him (or future generations) when he did.
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Starfinder Society:
Season 4: The Black Dominion Emerges
Now that Golarion has been returned to its rightful place in the celestial clockwork of the stars, the Starfinders must now tousle with the heavyweights of the void-realms - the Dominion of the Black, and discover not just why, but how they made Goarion disappear - and why in all creation did they bring it back. Will the Dominion stop referring to grey as "rainbow"? Can the Starfinders finally confront their own shadowy leadership to reveal just who and what decided updating Wayfinders to space was a bad idea? How will a returned Absalom deal with Absolom-in-the-skies? Can the fact that Galt has been scrubbed from the multiverse, and time, ever be reconciled with the small scrap of parchment found under the Space Shoggoth's heel that read "Vive le..."?
Stay tuned for the exciting fourth season of Starfinder Society, and be sure to enjoy SFS Adventure 4:1 "What the Shoggoth's hoary tail told."
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Just popping in before things are finalized to say "hey... if you go Organized Play and have every Starfinder Society mission end in an auto-failure because the campaign can't answer the big mystery, people might get pissed."Can you point to a SINGLE PFS scenario, Pathfinder Module, or Adventure path in which the party fails because Aroden's death is still a mystery? And you'll find that Aroden's death is at most,an irrelevant background detail for Confirmation.
No.
Because the primary purpose and focus of the Pathfinder Society isn't solving and investigating Aroden's death. They're investigating the myriad other mysteries in the Core.The Pathfinder Society's mission is to explore and experience lesser seen parts of the world then chronicle those adventures.
If there were no PFS Scenerios, modules, or Adventure Paths where you successfully explored a location, it would be a problem.
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Chief Technical Officer
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Are they on a five year or continuing mission?Just to clarify: Learning things about the Gap is only *one* of the Starfinders' missions. There are other aspects to what they do, all based around the core idea of exploring new worlds and sharing that information for the good of all.
Beyond that, I should probably hold my tongue until we're finished with development on those sections. :P
A three-hour tour... a three-hour tour.
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People like solving mysteries. If you present someone with a puzzle that they know has no answer, they won't bother solving it.Just because a mystery exists doesn't mean it can, or should, be solved.Right, which is my point.
The primary purpose of the Starfinders is to solve a mystery that, by the nature of the campaign, cannot and should not be solved.
This is a false assumption that makes statement that Starfinders can't succeed false as well. The fact that the setting materials won't reveal the answer and won't deal with that does not mean that the secret cannot or should not be solved. It's just leaves the decision up to GM. Each GM can define his or her own answer to the question and direct the campaign accordingly.
Shouldn't the answer be easy? Its like that so Starfinder characters cannot finder their Pathfinder characters and "mess up" that campaign and vice versa?
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It's not about the destination; it's about the journey. Don't worry about solving the mystery, just think about all the fun adventures you'll have along the way. What's more, it's a big galaxy, and as long as you have a strong imagination it will hold endless adventure for you. There are other things to do and explore besides only chasing the Gap.
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WOW - for me, a bear of little brain, I could care less whether the eventual outcome is to discover the "big mystery" or not. I want good adventures, well written (With the GM running them in mind!), and room for loads of space combat, blasters firing and derring-do!
Frankly, I am looking forward to something different from Pathfinder. Not there is anything wrong with it, and I am certainly not tired of it, but a little spice now and again is a good thing - even though salt is essential for life.
The problem with allowing your homebrew version of PF or STF to yield the big answers to the PCs, so they find out what (in your opinion) happened to Aroden or Golarion, is you run the sizable risk of alienating your ongoing campaign from future adventure paths where the big mystery is still unsolved and the plot depends upon that hook to draw the characters in.
Babylon 5 was a show that worked well for 5 years even though it resolved its major threat by year 3. Even after the Shadow war was won (after a fashion), the younger races still had to deal with all the complications that arose from the Vorlon-Shadow shenanigans, like overthrowing President Clark's administration, fighting the Centauri, dealing with the telepaths, and building a functional Interstellar Alliance. All those little problems had to be interesting to the audience, and they couldn't have been addressed effectively until the Shadows and Vorlons were dealt with. B5 is a good example of how you can eventually solve the big plot driver while still keeping the story going.
As for the unsolvable problem: if/when you ever saw the movie Titanic, did you ever expect the boat not to sink? If the boat was going to sink no matter what anyone did or didn't do, was it still entertaining to watch, and if so, where did that entertainment value come from? We got to see how people's lives were changed or ended due to a massively tragic accident.
Watching the Star Wars prequel trilogy, we knew going in that Luke's father would fall to the dark side. We didn't know how, and it will be debated forever whether his fall was satisfactorily entertaining as a story in hindsight, but knowing the outcome generally did not deter enough people that the movies were not profitable.
Much of H.P. Lovecraft's stories take a turn for the worse so that the characters end up in a worse state than when they started. Such is the nature of horror. Certainly there is influence from Lovecraft and horror with the two big mysteries of Paizo's: it's ultimately fantasy horror that has dictated Aroden dying, that this was a very bad thing for his worshipers and mankind generally, and that no one will know for sure what happened to Aroden as long as the PF mythos continues to develop. As with any horror story, the purpose of the story is not to wrap up all the loose ends, but to see if you can survive the fraying.
Babylon 5 was a show that worked well for 5 years even though it resolved its major threat by year 3.
If by "major threat" you mean the war with the Shadows, it was not resolved by year 3; it was resolved in the 6th episode of the 4th season, titled "Into the Fire".
It's not about the destination; it's about the journey. Don't worry about solving the mystery, just think about all the fun adventures you'll have along the way. What's more, it's a big galaxy, and as long as you have a strong imagination it will hold endless adventure for you. There are other things to do and explore besides only chasing the Gap.
Ah that old saying...written by somebody who probably could not write a good ending if their lives depended on it. Seen too many bad endings ruining what is otherwise a good story.
I have to admit that this annoys me more than the Aroden death mystery...mostly because I really don't care about Aroden. But a whole planet gone missing and having history removed that would be most interesting...till I realize there is no point to it.
A RPG (table top version) is very different than a TV show, books, movies, etc. Because you get immersed in your character more deeply than you would in any other medium used to telling stories because you created your character. So I get why this can be annoying for some people.
Me...I will just probably handle it different in my game...as in fully explain why Golarion is not there anymore and why history is lost.
It's not about the destination; it's about the journey. Don't worry about solving the mystery, just think about all the fun adventures you'll have along the way. What's more, it's a big galaxy, and as long as you have a strong imagination it will hold endless adventure for you. There are other things to do and explore besides only chasing the Gap.Ah that old saying...written by somebody who probably could not write a good ending if their lives depended on it. Seen too many bad endings ruining what is otherwise a good story.
I have to admit that this annoys me more than the Aroden death mystery...mostly because I really don't care about Aroden. But a whole planet gone missing and having history removed that would be most interesting...till I realize there is no point to it.
A RPG (table top version) is very different than a TV show, books, movies, etc. Because you get immersed in your character more deeply than you would in any other medium used to telling stories because you created your character. So I get why this can be annoying for some people.
Me...I will just probably handle it different in my game...as in fully explain why Golarion is not there anymore and why history is lost.
Agency over your own story is one of the great things about tabletop RPGS. We are all free to take our games wherever we desire. The Gap and Golarion's whereabouts don't bother me at all because there are many more immersive and deep stories to tell and adventures to be had, there are infinite other things to base an adventure on. Regarding SFS, I have faith the creative team will feature more than stories only involving the Gap. Not all PFS scenarios are about the death of Aroden, for example.
Regarding Golarion's fate, one story idea I may try is having my players secretly vote for Golarion's fate as the climax to an epic adventure. Imagine the Outer Gods attacking, the Dominion of the Black invading, or Rovagug breaking free, or all of the above simultaneously (with each the answer to the other), and a choice of how to save Golarion is placed on the PCs by the Inner Sea gods themselves. I'm thinking I could either have my players vote on an internet survey, or just print one out for them to write on. I could even keep the answer secret, or have different options available on each person's survey, so that the fate of Golarion remains a mystery and my players can continue to wonder what their fellows voted for. I could then sprinkle hints for the answer in Starfinder adventures.
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Me...I will just probably handle it different in my game...as in fully explain why Golarion is not there anymore and why history is lost.
Between you and me, if I was going to invent my own answer, it would be that Aroden learned of a far future threat from Rovagug, namely that Rovagug had a way out of its prison and that it was all but certain this plan would succeed. It included being able to somehow neutralize all the gods' powers who might be interested in stopping the Rough Beast (though Pharasma might be even beyond any of these events and apathetic to it all anyway). It's hard to imagine Rovagug neutralizing Asmodeus, but maybe he had his own contingency plans for dealing with Rovagug if it ever got out. But maybe Aroden tipped him off so that Asmodeus would give Aroden a chance to try his plan first? Who knows.
Anyway. So Aroden faked his own death and built a magical delorean to travel into the future, and past the point where Rovagug neutralized all the second-tier gods and below. Thus Aroden kept his powers, and confronted Rovagug at the very moment of its escape. With all the other gods' powers neutralized, Aroden managed to aggregate all the might of the gods in a great big Highlander "The One" moment, temporarily reaching first-tier on par with Pharasma herself, and cast Rovagug back down into its prison and sealed The Cage shut even better. Then Aroden stuck The Cage in his cosmic pocket for safekeeping.
Aroden, Asmodeus, and Pharasma agreed that for the good of the cosmos, The Gap would be imposed to cover-up the near escape of Rovagug. It would make the gods look bad everywhere if it did become known to mortals how close Rovagug got to escaping, and the secret behind its ability to neutralize the gods. Their faith and worship might waver as a result.
As part of the agreement, Aroden would go into retirement with most of his Highlander powers intact, but return some of it to the gods who lost theirs. Not all of the gods were interested or able to reclaim their mantles (which is how some of them never recovered or slipped into obscurity.) All the surviving gods have a vested interest in not talking about Aroden, Rovagug, Golarion, or The Gap. As it is, not all of them know the whole story and none of them who knows Aroden is still alive somewhere can or will ever tell Iomedae about it.
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Chief Technical Officer
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Golarion is missing and the universe has forgotten everything that occurred during that period of time! And the Starfinder Society has dedicated themselves to tracking down lost lore from the Gap, deducing what happened during the missing years, and discovering what happened to Golarion.
Except they never will.
If the Starfinders ever succeed, the campaign hook will be over. So they're doomed to fail. Predestined. Their mission is impossible and plot and reality will always prevent the Starfinders from actually succeeding at their purpose. Instead, the best they can hope for is minor mysteries and local lore.
The primary flaw in your argument is its scope—it presumes that "what happened during the missing years" is a single answerable question, and also that's it's the only question of import.
But even if it were that simple... let's say you're an archeologist looking for evidence of Atlantis, and you find it. Would you think your job has just ended? I'd think it has just begun.