That has some odd implications, though. Asmodeus was the lord of Hell. He ruled an entire outer plane where lawful evil souls went. So...are there other 'Hells' and Asmodeus only got the Golarion souls? That would seem to make the outer planes dramatically more complex than we've understood. Are there alien Empyreal Lords guarding the levels of other Heavens? Are there alien Planes of Fire, Shadow, etc ruled over by other Elemental Lords?
Maybe Damoritosh didn't want any other Lawful Evil gods getting souls that he rightfully saw as his and decided to conquer hell.
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That has some odd implications, though. Asmodeus was the lord of Hell. He ruled an entire outer plane where lawful evil souls went. So...are there other 'Hells' and Asmodeus only got the Golarion souls? That would seem to make the outer planes dramatically more complex than we've understood. Are there alien Empyreal Lords guarding the levels of other Heavens? Are there alien Planes of Fire, Shadow, etc ruled over by other Elemental Lords?Maybe Damoritosh didn't want any other Lawful Evil gods getting souls that he rightfully saw as his and decided to conquer hell.
And when Damoritosh a tactically brilliant and terribly efficient god of war approached the lord of darkness and crushing despair demanding his job the Prince of Darkness laughed and handed him the keys.
The poor bastard.
Maybe Damoritosh didn't want any other Lawful Evil gods getting souls that he rightfully saw as his and decided to conquer hell.
Sounds like a book I read once.
I have to agree with others, demotion isn't the correct way to look at it.
More like the core 20 were big players on the world of Golarian back in the day, but even then may not have had much of a following in the wider universe.
There is also the question of which gods exist as a different aspect. Even on Golarian, you had Desna looking quite a bit different to worshippers in Tian Xia than in Avistan or Garund. The exact relationship that Shimye-Magalla has to Desna and Gozreh isn't explained either.
There are definitely different cultural aspects to how the gods are perceived.
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The idea that certain deities have been demoted or become less important in an overall sense between is sadly very parochial. The Pact Worlds are one system out of perhaps 100 billion (if a galaxy the same size as the Milky Way) systems out of perhaps 100+ billion galaxies. In Starfinder some decent proportion of those have intelligent life.
The only thing that ever made Golarion interesting in a cosmological sense was that Rovagug was imprisoned there. The deeds of its inhabitants, the gods who have worshippers there, and the proportions of worshippers simply don't matter in a cosmological sense. There may be more gods in the multiverse than there are sentient creatures in the Pact Worlds.
And as the story of Aroden told us, most gods probably don't matter at all in the end. Iomedae is a brand new flash in the pan known to at most a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of mortals. The only gods who seem to definitely matter universally across all the epochs of existence are Pharasma as the ultimate referee of everything, eventually Groetus as the eventual destroyer of it all, and maybe Asmodeus as the only single entity who has grabbed authority over all an alignment's souls not otherwise pledged to a specific god and who seems to have been playing at the highest levels since very early in the multiverse's existence. At least 20 other gods have more followers than he does in the Pact Worlds? Who cares, you can be assured he's doing just fine across the rest of existence, and even in the Pact Worlds he's picking up most of the LE souls who don't follow a god.
These guys are like immortal dictators of the nations on the UN security council. Most gods in the Pathfinder/Starfinder universe are like the tribal chief of 500 people in the Amazon who don't have contact with the outside world.
Who's up, who's down? Who cares. Vote Team Groetus or Team Four Horsemen, they're the only ones with a viable and defensible long-term philosophy of existence.
As I'm just learning more about the Starfinder setting, I'm liking the new sandbox (filled with star dust) that Paizo is building. I agree with those who see the core 20 as mere guidelines for cosmology building in my own campaign. I have already moved a lot of sand around in my existing campaign, based on the Mummy's Mask AP. I've advanced the timeline by about three hundred years and had Golarion enter its late industrial revolution (ala 1880's).
The Worldwound was sealed and, with it, an unintentional consequence was that a "knot" in the magical energy of the planet was created. This knot created global chaos as the balance of power shifted, magical leylines dried up or moved and magical energy became a commodity sought by colonial powers throughout the world. Many species of magical creatures became extinct. The elves left again, this time along with most of the gnomes and other fey creatures. Occult magic and psionics increased and political borders changed a lot. And the entire thing happened largely because of Nethys.
I have a heavenly back story going on in which Asmodeus and Sarenrae connived with Pharasma to perfectly time a prophecy in which Nethys' protective nature is dominant and allows mortals the liberty needed to seal the Worldwound once and for all. Every attempt in the past had been thwarted by Nethys who could foresee the constriction it would place on the world's magical energy. Nethys felt deceived (something unheard of for him) and became even more mad than usual. He sank into a centuries-long funk and withdrew his attention from the world, causing even greater problems with the flow of magical energy and, incidentally, a greater demand for scientific and technological innovation.
Meanwhile, Zon-Kuthon saw all of this as an opportunity to inflict the ultimate pain on Golarion and upon the gods themselves. He used Nethys' resentment, anger and pain to convince him to go along with a plan to punish the world and the gods for their corruption of the world's magical energy by shifting the entire planet into the plane of Shadow. Like most divine plans, the magic involved a lot of cultists, rituals, prophecies and such to complete -- along with loads of time (in mortal terms).
Here's where the Mummy's Mask comes in. One of those plans involves restoring a certain pharaoh to power in Nethys' old stomping grounds -- Osirion. Here's where I take some liberties. It turns out that the Shory sky magic used to power the flying cities and pyramids wasn't entirely of magical origin. In case my players are reading, I won't go too much further, but I think you get the idea. Victorian steampunk meets Stargate and the "shift" toward a Starfinder campaign begins.