The Gap, Making it More Real


General Discussion


Intellectually, I understand the explanation of the Gap. Viscerally, not so much.

From various statements, we know some information came out of the Gap, but it was contradictory or did not make sense.

One day, I hope some devs in Paizo can create some examples of the contradictory and nonsensical information that made it out of the Gap so players (who care to) can internalize the same things as people living after the Gap.

Perhaps as a preface to a worldbook, or possibly a web enhancement to The Pact Worlds? I miss web enhancements.


I think that you may be thinking about The Gap as an intellectual gap when they really seem to be pushing the idea that something super mystical happened and that, for all intents and purposes, removed the period from everyone's memories. We're even told that divination spells don't work when trying to glean information from The Gap.

In regards to how characters internalize that, I would imagine that it's similar to the ways your players are. It's long enough ago that it has little relevance to their day to day and is treated more as a fact of history (think about how little the average person thinks about events that happened over 200 years ago.) Obviously, it is still a major pursuit for researchers and historians who are trying to figure out what happened, but all of the characters have been aware of and known about it for their entire lives. Unless it's a passionate subject for them, it's not likely to be something that they spend a lot of time thinking about unless it becomes relevant during a mission.

Functionally, The Gap is a great tool to seperate the Pathfinder/Starfinder timelines while allowing them the option to explain further if they run out of narrative rope. I don't expect that we'll be getting any more detail on the big questions for quite a bit, if ever.


I wasn't asking for answers to mysteries in this topic. I was asking if we could get some examples of the mysteries coming out of the Gap. That may not happen, of course, but I think I can ask.

Second Seekers (Luwazi Elsebo)

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Pathfinder Starfinder Society Subscriber

I know it's probably not a satisfying answer, but I imagine a lot of the "disagreements" coming from the Gap are boring minutiae that probably mattered a lot at the time, but by current day's historical vantage point are pretty much just academic. Things that are impossible to prove one way or another but don't mean much.

Like, to make up some examples:
- An entry in the Starfinder Archives states that Lothwain the Redeemer's Beautiful Crusade on Aucturn began in 7415 AR and lasted for 2 years; however references to the Crusade in the histories of Shelyn's holy records state it began in 7377 AR, and lasted just under five years.

- It is known that the Klorvaxan True Death was a plague that affected only Undead that ripped through Eox during the Gap. A chapbook excavated from an Eoxian dig site claims that it was divine punishment sent from Urgathoa to punish Eoxians for some unknown insult, but a recently unearthed corporate financial statement from GreenLyfe Solutions LLC, based out of the Burning Archipelago, states it was an accidental quarantine break of an experimental bioweapon ran amok.

- The Historians' Brawl, a recent (and hilarious!) scholarly melee, resulting more in bruised egos and tarnished reputations than bodily harm, which erupted during this year's annual Symposium of Qabarati Archivists. The quarrel is said to have begun when a Witchwyrd merchant-historian hosted a viewing of a perfect astronomical calendar apparently on loan from The First Vault, which contradicts the generally accepted date of a star going Supernova during the Gap. As that star's supernova date is considered one of the few relatively stable and known "tentpole dates" against which other events are measured and calculated within the Gap, changing when it happened would force revisions of dozens of other datings.


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Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Nice ideas, Kishmo, though I imagine it would be even more vague and contradictory than even that.

In all of your examples, we know those events happened, the only question is WHEN they happened. That's not too dissimilar from what real-world historians know today, without there even being a Gap.

In your second example, for example, I imagine there would yet be a third or fourth source that indicated contradictory information; that there was no plague or incident at all, or an incident of a very different kind.


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Quote:
One day, I hope some devs in Paizo can create some examples of the contradictory and nonsensical information that made it out of the Gap so players (who care to) can internalize the same things as people living after the Gap.

Technically, contradictory and nonsensical information is always making it out of the Gap. Any view of any star from more than 317 light-years away is a view of that star before the Gap. This means the Gap would have to be constantly "present," in a sense, randomizing or confusing data whenever it's observed at that distance.

This would play serious havoc with astronomy. In fact, astronomy as we know it would be impossible, since in this universe you cannot get consistent readings on the planets orbiting stars at any significant distance in light-years. Maybe the data varies every-so-slightly for different observers at different times; likely the stars look "normal," but closer investigation reveals that you're looking at a foam of quantum indeterminacy that never resolves into a single picture.

That would be the primary (and most alien) example of contradictions coming out of the Gap. It would add a whole other layer of enigma to Ibra the Inscrutable in particular, who may be directly responsible for randomizing or confounding information about distant cosmological phenomena. It would be why Ibra's "followers worship through appreciation of the cosmos, and disregard all notions of moral alignment in place of simple questions about the patterns and properties of celestial bodies — questions Ibra's followers must simply ask, as the answers themselves are immaterial."

"Historical records are mixed up and contradict each other" is pretty small potatoes by comparison (and not all that different from normal-universe history as Raving points out).


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For a more "local" example of enigmas from the Gap: there are still Elves, dragons, and of course Eoxian undead and various extraplanar beings old enough to have lost memories to the Gap. In fact, it's perfectly possible that Bone Sages exist whose unlives actually span the Gap, before and after. (Though probably no such figure will ever appear in official materials.) The Gap didn't wipe out all information evenly and there are pockets or "caches" of data that survive and can be reconciled with each other.

In light of this, one interesting character-driven hook could be discovering such a "cache" within the memories of several immortals at once: perhaps a particular intense shared memory of a spot on a certain world where the various entities interacted that could provide a clue to a major interplanetary war, or a summit of great powers, or clues to the origins of a specific threat that survived into the post-Gap universe. How this particular "memory cache" could come to light would be a story unto itself.

In the meantime, such entities still retain memories from during the Gap that would hint at *possible* events, but those memories would be fuzzy and indistinct and would change on any attempt to recall them, much like dreams. That could be a source of countless contradictory but suggestive and compelling accounts of events during the Gap which might well provide all sorts of fuel for archaeological attempts to verify one narrative or another.

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