Lost Golarion

[Locotomo]

One thing is bothering me.
If the Gap wiped out all knowledge about history, how do people know there was a planet called Golarion?

[UnArcaneElection]

The Gap didn't wipe out all knowledge about all history, just knowledge of history of a time well after the Pathfinder Campaign Setting but somewhat before the Starfinder Campaign Setting (close enough that some Elves and maybe some Dwarves and Gnomes that were born during the Gap are still alive, but far enough that most other sentient beings have had a few generations since then). So historians have some shot at pulling up information about what happened during the various Pathfinder APs and before and after, but get stumped when they try to find out what happened more recently.

[Locotomo]

So, what you mean is, that only the knowledge in between the Gap, which lasted several 1000 years, is lost?

[Rysky the Dark Solarion]

I think the Gap only lasted a couple hundred years, not thousands, but I'd have to double check.

But yeah, the history within the Gap is lost, and the history before that has been tampered with to some extent.

[ENHenry]

The quote from page 424 is, " What is known, however, is that while the Gap is universal— and a combination of carbon dating and astrochronology suggest it lasted several millennia—its edges are geotemporally inconsistent."

So it covers a very long time, but not ALL recorded history. It's much like pur own real-world knowledge of some pre-bronze age cultures; we have carbon-dating and some artifacts, but nothing actually written down anywhere, only partial evidence and speculation, yet we know their existance.

[Rysky the Dark Solarion]

Oh wow.

[Scarvexx]

I imagine this has to be quite a stir. Every race across known space has a lost history all of their own, every new world is going to think of it in diffrent terms, it could be that the gap has little to do with Golarion and it's a matter of bad timing.

For all we know the drift was already well known in those times. Or there was an erasure of some massive world shattering war and the only chance at peace was to erase the past.

The gods near and distant are hush on the whole subject, which means that somehow they were affected or agree that the gap should remain unknown, perhaps to stop people from making it happen again.

[CBDunkerson]

Scarvexx wrote:

For all we know the drift was already well known in those times.

No... because there were not drift ships and/or temples of Triune all over the place. Basically, there were no 'artifacts' of a 'drift culture' until Triune revealed itself and taught people about the drift a few years after the Gap ended.

Quote:

Or there was an erasure of some massive world shattering war and the only chance at peace was to erase the past.

Again, no... there would be battlefields and cemeteries and war machines that people would see and be able to figure out the general background of (e.g. what the different sides were).

Maybe there could have been some limited knowledge of the drift just starting out and this was hidden away / removed so that the drift could be re-introduced... or some event that could have TRIGGERED a massive war might have been covered up and then forgotten in the Gap... but massive societal changes could not be hidden.

As to how Golarion is known... some pre-Gap records of it still exist on Absalom station, other planets in the solar system, and various other planes. Some of its ancient residents (including various gods) still exist and have memories of it before the Gap. Et cetera.

A few thousand years of non-procedural memory and recorded history were 'scrubbed'... but the physical results of those years still exist and provide a road map to figuring out large scale societal changes which took place during the Gap.

[Silentman73]

The current explanation is that it's quite literally a gap - there are some longer-lived species who have memories from before it, but all memories of the period it encompasses are excised. A great analogy to me is you wake up one morning, you get in your car, and your odometer says 20,000 miles. You remember buying the car and driving it off the lot when it had 7 miles on the odometer, but you don't remember any of the intervening 19,993 miles - where you drove, whether you've had to replace any malfunctioning parts or replace a cracked windshield, etc.

Except in this case it's a matter of thousands of years, not miles. Golarian species (the traditional Pathfinder races) in all likelihood were at the Pathfinder-level medieval development when the Gap occurred, but we don't know for sure, because we have no notation of what the Golarian calendar date was when the Gap started. It's possible things had progressed well into the initial stages of space exploration: Golarion might have been about where Earth is now in its technological development.

Again, I don't think it's an answer we're going to get from Paizo. The Gap is Starfinder's analog to the Aroden mystery in Pathfinder. For my own campaigns, I've chosen to posit that Aroden didn't, in fact, die at Starfall, but was imprisoned. He likely broke free at some point but was prevented (possibly by Asmodeus) from returning to Golarion, and set up shop in a "safe" plane to plot how he'd return to the world. I propose tech had progressed to discovery of and an initial breach into the Drift, which caused a catastrophe on Golarion. Aroden expended his own power (and life) to yank the entirety of Golarion out of its solar orbit to save it from this catastrophe, and it's now safely ensconced where he'd been, safe but unable to interact with the rest of the Material Plane. The gods are staying silent about these specifics because they suspect Asmodeus had something to do with enabling the unsafe access to the Drift, and are plotting on how best to deal with him. Meanwhile, post-Gap, Triune has delivered Drift engines that can safely access the Drift to make up for Asmodeus' temerity & callous disregard for mortal life on Golarion, enabling the status quo in which Starfinder now exists.

[David knott 242]

Another thing to note is that the Gap is not a totally blank slate -- there are legends about events that could only have happened during the Gap (such as a goblin tribe stowing away on a ship going from Golarion to Absalom Station and Torag staying with Golarion when it was removed from our universe) but nothing that can be positively dated and verified.

[Herald]

If I had to guess and I'm pretty sure that we won't get an answer but, here is my take on it.

There very well might have been a war, one of interdementional levels. One so sever that it actually damaged and/or altered the Akashic Records. Perhaps just erasing the whole part of history that involves the gap.

Who ever might have done this damage might have been trying to kick start prophesy again or change history to retcon something to remake reality, and it very well may have gone very badly.

Torag being a creator god might very well have saved the universe while trying to fix the issue, but found himself suddenly trapped in the Time dimension. For that matter, that could very well be where Golarion is in the Starfinder timeline.

[Yakman]

Locotomo wrote:

One thing is bothering me.

If the Gap wiped out all knowledge about history, how do people know there was a planet called Golarion?

i was just thinking this the other day...

also, did the Gap wipe out all writing or data from the period? or just writing that might be called "historical"?

did everyone "wake up" with no credit history?

[Luke Spencer]

Yakman wrote:

Locotomo wrote:

One thing is bothering me.

If the Gap wiped out all knowledge about history, how do people know there was a planet called Golarion?

i was just thinking this the other day...

also, did the Gap wipe out all writing or data from the period? or just writing that might be called "historical"?

did everyone "wake up" with no credit history?

The Gap erased pretty much all information for an undefined amount of time in the middle of history, not the whole of history. Historians would remember any known information about Golarion before the Gap but nothing about anything that happened during the Gap, in the same way an immortal vampire who lived during Pathfinder times would remember things that happened when Aroden was alive, but maybe not anything after he died (just as an example, not necessarily when the cutoff was since we don't know that).

[Shadowkire]

page 487 wrote:

Born a mortal human on Golarion, Iomedae ascended to godhood centuries before the Gap, and when humanity left the planet of their birth for the stars, they brought their faith in Iomedae with them.

Iomedae became a god 900 years before Pathfinder's "current year", meaning the Gap spans the entire length of history between that time and 300 years before Starfinder's "current year".

Aroden's death/disappearance/??? began what is called the Age of Lost Omens. It is characterized by the sudden unreliability of prophesy, several massive disasters, and groups of people who start out being "average" becoming mighty enough to challenge even the gods over the course of half a year.

The fate of Golarion and the truth behind the Gap is rooted in the mystery of what happened to Aroden and how the world was changed by it.