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I apologize for retreading old ground if this has been discussed already, but I am curious how people plan to reconcile Good characters utilizing FTL technology. My understanding is that a byproduct of its function is essentially ripping off chunks of other Planes and adding it to the Drift. Mechanically, I understand that it is a way to include random encounters in Starfinder (though I wonder if there is a need for random encounters at all - but that's a discussion for another thread). However, wouldn't most Good denizens of the universe be opposed to uprooting people from their homes and depositing them in the Drift? Granted, here in the real world we engage in all sorts of activities that are unsustainable and unhealthy for ourselves and others. However, I feel like literally tearing off a piece of Heaven (complete with Angels) is a bit more in-your-face than, say, driving a gas guzzler or not recycling.
I'd love to hear what y'all have to say on the subject. Maybe someone has a moral workaround, or maybe I'm just not looking at it the same way you are. Whatever the case may be, let me know!
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The same way that Good characters can reconcile using the automobile, computers, smartphones, and other aspects of technology, despite their environmental effects.
In the Starfinder mythos, Good characters will know that if they don't participate, they cede the Universe to Evil.
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Using a phone that was made with practices that don't align with your morality is a bit less egregious than actively tearing up someone's home every time you travel. I felt that I addressed the difference in the two fairly well in my initial post, mostly because I figured that would be the go-to response. In my opinion, though, they aren't at all on the same scale. It would be like, in order to place a call, I caused a random building to be magically transported to....I don't know, Antarctica. Maybe the building is an old ramshackle shed that no one uses, so no harm, no foul. But maybe it's an apartment complex with lots of hardworking families that in no way deserved what just happened to them.
The argument that Good characters don't want to "cede the Universe to Evil" holds a bit more water, but it feels like a handwave to me. Like, we need characters to behave in this fashion for things to work, so lets construct a reason why they would do so. After all, it's great that you were able to travel to Narendra III to stop the Space-Drow from attacking the Space-Orcs, but if you ripped up Heaven to do it, how much did you really accomplish?
I realize that this could very well be coming off as complaining, and I don't want it to. I see a lot of potential RP opportunities with this FTL system, which is great. But, at the same time, I feel that - at least the way I am currently envisioning it working - the mechanics of FTL somewhat limit the agency of the players, as certain types of characters simply wouldn't be willing to pay the price that FTL entails.
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Using a phone that was made with practices that don't align with your morality is a bit less egregious than actively tearing up someone's home every time you travel. I felt that I addressed the difference in the two fairly well in my initial post, mostly because I figured that would be the go-to response. In my opinion, though, they aren't at all on the same scale. It would be like, in order to place a call, I caused a random building to be magically transported to....I don't know, Antarctica. Maybe the building is an old ramshackle shed that no one uses, so no harm, no foul. But maybe it's an apartment complex with lots of hardworking families that in no way deserved what just happened to them.
The argument that Good characters don't want to "cede the Universe to Evil" holds a bit more water, but it feels like a handwave to me. Like, we need characters to behave in this fashion for things to work, so lets construct a reason why they would do so. After all, it's great that you were able to travel to Narendra III to stop the Space-Drow from attacking the Space-Orcs, but if you ripped up Heaven to do it, how much did you really accomplish?
I realize that this could very well be coming off as complaining, and I don't want it to. I see a lot of potential RP opportunities with this FTL system, which is great. But, at the same time, I feel that - at least the way I am currently envisioning it working - the mechanics of FTL somewhat limit the agency of the players, as certain types of characters simply wouldn't be willing to pay the price that FTL entails.
I'm also not quite that sure that it works quite the way you describe it as doing so.
And by the way I wasn't talking about how smartphones were made. They can be made in the most humane ways possible, but it doesn't change the consequences of both mining the rare earths that go into them, and the environmental consequences of tech winding up in landfills after disposal.
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The Great Beyond is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to the Great Beyond.
-The Starfinder's Guide to the Vast (Apologies to Mr Adams.)
Bits and chunks of the Drift are likely made up of bits and chunks of other planes, but that doesn't mean that there was anybody living on it when it happened. It is possible that there are bits torn up that nobody even noticed were missing. Heck, traveling along Drift Beacons might lessen or even eliminate interdimensional cross rips entirely.
I bet that superstition has developed into a lot of prayers and rituals that are supposed to be good luck in regard to these rips. Charms to keep the tears from populated areas, little curses to inflict them upon your opposing factions. "Churn your soul in the Drift!" and that sort of thing.
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More Drift info here. It should be all queued up to the right spot.
May i suggest reading this 3 books series:
The Three-Body Problem.
In the last part - Death´s End - you might find a possible solution.
As far as i remember the book is mentioned as inspiration in the CRB.
I think it's a fair point, and could be a story element in sone games. There could be "Drift-abolition" movements, some people who still rely on the old ways to travel, etc.
Allowing for different views on what "good" means makes for an interesting and rich setting.
well here's the thing. and please correct me if I am mistaken, I am just reading up on the game setting now as I bought the CRB and AA last week.
to my understanding the books never say how much matter gets pulled to the drift with each jump only that longer jump = more matter. so a short jump might be a pebble for all we know while a large jump might be a larger rock. The books also state you cannot access the drift with magic. it never says something cannot escape it. so a more powerful entity could be hanging around doing extraplanar things when suddenly BAM he is in what appears to be a heap of planar junk. he gives an irritated sigh then plane shifts home.
Very, very few outsiders are able to plane shift. This includes the powerful ones.
Seems to me, in regards to what a good aligned characters would have issues with, the concerns about drift travel is pretty far below, say...using Charm and Dominate spells. But that's another debate.
That being said, it's never said how quickly the matter is pulled through, or how much. Given that it's based on the length of the jump, I don't imagine it's an instantaneous thing. However, it's possible that artifacts or individual get sucked through. In that case, I imagine there's good money for mortals to be made for assisting outsiders in recovering their lost people or items. (I see good aligned outsiders being more active in this, evil ones are more likely to not care about lost individuals).
So would good characters basically allow The Swarm, Veskarium, Eox, or whatever dark horror the vast can pop up just rip up everything instead?
Also, bear in mind many of those planes we are talking about are quite literally infinite. They only have borders in an esoteric sort of sense.
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Does the general public even know what effect travelling in the Drift has?
Why the technology
involves this side effect is unknown, though some conspiracy
theorists believe that the ever-increasing size of the Drift—and
the corresponding shrinking of the other planes of existence—is
part of an inscrutable power play by Triune itself.
That's the only indication that anyone might know what happens that I could find after a quick scan of the section on Drift travel. Even that suggests that it's merely a conspiracy theory.
Even if the text does imply that everyone knows how the Drift works, you can easily say that nobody does. I can't see why Triune would have told everyone how it works when it gave them the technology. It seems more logical to keep that information to itself.
A good character could hardly be blamed for using the Drift if they don't know. You could use that as a plot point, though. I'm sure that even if people don't know, there are rumours about things that have been seen/encountered in the Drift. That doesn't mean anyone knows how they got there, though.
Also, bear in mind many of those planes we are talking about are quite literally infinite. They only have borders in an esoteric sort of sense.
That's also my thought. Are the chunks from inside or nibbles at their "borders" (as much as infinite spaces have them).
I see it as celestial osmosis. The triune basically made a new infinite space and the travel is basically causing things to leak into it to reach some kind of equilibrium. Maybe eventually if drift travel lasts long enough you wind up with basically a new outer plane that looks more similar to the other ones.
Very, very few outsiders are able to plane shift. This includes the powerful ones.
It is my (limited) understanding that it doesn't matter who can plane shift or not. If you don't have a drift engine, you aren't getting in or out.
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I see it as celestial osmosis. The triune basically made a new infinite space and the travel is basically causing things to leak into it to reach some kind of equilibrium. Maybe eventually if drift travel lasts long enough you wind up with basically a new outer plane that looks more similar to the other ones.
My personal headcanon is that the Drift is coalescing around the unreachable pocket dimension where Golarion rests, like a pearl growing within an oyster
And the Starstone is the lynchpin that anchors this pocket to the rest of the universe
This explains why the Drift is so recent, why it has strange properties related to bending space/time, why the Starstone is the ultimate Drift beacon and why the Drift, not being completely of this world, cannot be reached by magic
Triune is in charge of reinforcing it, hence the gift of FTL technology to mortals. With its not so coincidental effect on the growth of the Drift
In this theory, FTL travel is only a side benefit and not the main goal of Triune's gift of Drift Engines technology
And no deity openly fights against the Drift because they fear what would happen should it stop growing or, even worse, if it breaks
Very, very few outsiders are able to plane shift. This includes the powerful ones.It is my (limited) understanding that it doesn't matter who can plane shift or not. If you don't have a drift engine, you aren't getting in or out.
You definitely can’t get in with magic, I think it’s unclear if you can escape.
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If you erased everyone's knowledge of Rovagug after imprisoning him. he would lose his followers, as per the rules of Deities in the PF/D&D setting, if there are no followers of a certain God or Goddess then, over time, that God or Goddess loses their power and divinity.
That's actually not a thing in Pathfinder. Gods function just as fine power wise with followers as without.
It also doesn't hurt that not a single god seems to have spoken out against it, even the realy goody-two-shoes ones, indicating that the very forces that dictate what it is to be 'good' seem to think it's no big deal.
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Far as Rova goes:
Someone took away the cage that contained a beast only Asmodeus can free. So, way I figure..
1. Rovagug got out, so they took the planet away.
2. Someone decided to take Asmodeus's pet Qlippoth away from him.
3. Asmodeus decided to take his planet into hell, might as well afterall.
4. The drift was built around the cage as a method of reinforcing it.
5. The cage was taken to the abyss.
Far as the Drift goes, most people likely don't know or don't feel it significant. I do think it would be interesting to see it grow into a plane of neutrality, not by being neither hot nor cold, but by being both. Fiendish celestials and celestial fiends, proteans bound by law and inevitables warped by chaos. Perhaps then, it is a plan to eventually 'naturally' create a new form of Aeon or something akin to them.
Aside from... possible eventual things of that place, imagine this for an adventure plot hook: You use the drift, you come out, and something got on your ship. It could be a demon, a qlippoth, it could be a denizen of leng, it could be an inevitable you just pissed off, it could be anything. Hell, what would happen if you happened to pull through a place that happened to be occupied by a deity or a demigod?
*Goes into drift, goes out, oh look... Orcus is on my ship, or my god happens to be lost in the drift*
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I intend to have the rule be the amount of plane moved into the drift correlates to the mass moving into the drift. Use your small ship the size of a city bus? Only matter the size of a bus gets dragged in. Use a drift engine on a hellknight vessel the size of a small town? An area the size of a small town gets dragged in. It's not much, but just enough. That's how I intend to view it-so if there's something truly massive in the drift, makes you wonder what went through the drift to put it there...
so if there's something truly massive in the drift, makes you wonder what went through the drift to put it there...Or if there's something truly massive that is missing...
What ever happened to Shelyn? She's been less.. talkative.. to her followers.
Eh, this is just the Star Trek problem... It was discovered in TNG that going to warp could break sub-space and cause massive damage on a galactic scale.
The Enterprise still went to warp.
Source? I want to see that episode! :-)
It wasnt exactly that it had more to do with the actual speed of warp. past warp 7 reality started to tear more than bend.
You know not that a race like Q ever had that problem.
7th season Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Force of Nature". For the rest of that series, a speed limit of warp 5 was imposed on Federation vessels for non-emergency situations.
I seem to recall that redesign of warp engines eventually eliminated this problem during the run of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but I can find no references to that effect.
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Aside from... possible eventual things of that place, imagine this for an adventure plot hook: You use the drift, you come out, and something got on your ship. It could be a demon, a qlippoth, it could be a denizen of leng, it could be an inevitable you just pissed off, it could be anything. Hell, what would happen if you happened to pull through a place that happened to be occupied by a deity or a demigod?
*Goes into drift, goes out, oh look... Orcus is on my ship, or my god happens to be lost in the drift*
Excellent point. Can a deity be taken to the Drift against their will ? Can a deity go into the Drift under their own power ? Is this what Shelyn did, looking for clues about Doubral's own journey in this new plane ?
Can a deity get out of the Drift under their own power ? Does Triune go into the Drift looking for deities who got stranded there ? Would Triune use a divine spaceship to travel the Drift ? Did all deities start building divine spaceships or do Drift engines only work in the Material plane ?
Space is vast, like really vast. And it's mostly empty too. The planes are even more vast.
I imagine the odds of relocating something noteworthy are about as likely as a pile of junk getting grenaded,then the debris flying into the shape of a fully functional airplane by chance.
And now I want a mechanic/technomancer Icon duo that stages performances of spontaneous assembly grenades, but is actually just a junkbot spell.
That sounds like fun, Haywire. Also:
Space is vast, like really vast. And it's mostly empty too. The planes are even more vast.
I imagine the odds of relocating something noteworthy are about as likely as a pile of junk getting grenaded,then the debris flying into the shape of a fully functional airplane by chance.
...How do we know it is actually random and not just apparently random? There could be a connection based on location, direction, size, alignment of crew, ect.. Or it even could be determined by Triune. "Chunk here.. chunk there.. This time has the least amount of suspicion, who/what has the most probable cause to go missing next and would benefit me most in the long run?"
Space is vast, like really vast. And it's mostly empty too. The planes are even more vast.
I imagine the odds of relocating something noteworthy are about as likely as a pile of junk getting grenaded,then the debris flying into the shape of a fully functional airplane by chance.
Which is sort of my argument. Something significant being in the Drift is, in my view, a function of story rather than random chance. More "we need you to go into the Drift and find this" rather than "You're traveling through the drift and see X."
Of course, I can also see certain forces getting trapped in the Drift. Engines burned out, seeking the chunks of other planes as some kind of safe haven. If the chunk is big enough, perhaps settling there...
Space is vast, like really vast. And it's mostly empty too. The planes are even more vast.
I imagine the odds of relocating something noteworthy are about as likely as a pile of junk getting grenaded,then the debris flying into the shape of a fully functional airplane by chance.
In other words, 100%.
*cough* They kind of already said where Shelyn is: traveling into the deep depths of the Outer Dark that her brother Dou-Bral once did, to find out a way to cure him. And she's not out of "radio contact", she's just distant and static-y.
No... It says that her responses are infrequent and fractured, leading some to Believe she's traveling beyond the known multiverse in search of a cure for her brother. And in all seriousness I believe that to be the case, which.. does leave an opening for a certain person to take over as the matron goddess of artists.
That said, it is still an interesting possibility. Course, I have this to ask:
Though it is unlikely, if the event of taking a being from a plane is something truly unlikely and left to chance, what would happen if a jump took a Danava Pillar from their plane?