Starfinder, Planar Realms, and the New Deities

[Metaphysician]

Starfinder adds an array of new deities to the setting, and often new context for the old. Where do you imagine the planar realms of the various new deities like Yaraesa and Talavet are located, and what are they like? Do any of the old deities have substantially changed realms?

Basically, what kind of uses and changes do you envision for the planes in the year XXXX?

[Opsylum]

I've wondered about this myself. Here are my ideas.

Damoritosh:

Since Asmodeus's reach seems to have diminished far into the future of the Golarion system, I figure that Starfinder's own new big, bad lawful evil may have had something to do with it. During the Gap, Damoritosh mustered his legions of fallen Veskarium war heroes and laid siege to Hell, establishing a beachhead in the infernal realm. The Conqueror needs no sacred realm of his own - his only realm is the place he currently occupies while conquering the territory of an honorable foe. And what more valorous prize can be had than Hell itself? As Asmodeus fights to reaquire his realm from this upstart nuisance of a god, he has become momentarily preoccupied from planar politicking.

The Devourer:

The Devourer's sacred realm is a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, with a mind-shattering, inescapable event horizon. Beyond that event horizon...just nothing. There is nothing at all. Ominously, a portion of the Devourer's event horizon has overlapped over a long derelict chasm within the Abyss, eons away from Lamashtu, but pulling strong enough to temporarily tug her attention away from prey outside of her own domain, for now.

Eloritu:

Eloritu's unnameable sacred realm is a secret to everyone, if it even exists. On the off chance you ever actually get there, you may not even realize it. It's nature and location are always shrouded in myth and misdirection, understood differently and fractionally by any of Eloritu's acolytes lucky enough to know anything at all. Some have seen an expansive labyrinth, others a vast library of arcane lore, and yet others a fog-shrouded valley inhabited with alien tombs and warded with strange, eldritch phenomena. Whenever anyone leaves Eloritu's domain, it is in such a way as to leave the journeyer doubtful that their visitation even occurred at all. If they journeyed in search of knowledge, they may discover it, but walk away with more questions than answers than even before - their first question seeming pale and insignificant in light of their new discovery.

Hylax:

Hylax has taken up a residence in Heaven alongside Iomedae, expanding Forgeheart underneath the Holy Mountain with expansive hive colonies to shore up Angradd's inherited realm, weakened with the disappearance of Torag. The innumerable gold-encrusted burrows Hylax oversees act as convenient stargates to all the locations her followers have made first contact with new civilizations - granting Heaven easier access to defend distant, vulnerable worlds.

Oras & Yaraesa:

Oras and Yaraesa are both rooted much more to the nature of the Material Plane than the abstract concepts and ideals that the Great Beyond is made up from, so I picture their sacred domain being somewhere accessible entire by mundane means: a single, distant star system, lush with life and abundance, but fraught with peril. Within this star system, life has prospered everywhere, forming complex ecosystems even within vacuum. If one were to look at this system from far off, you would see what almost looks like a hollow, luminescent superplanet, with constantly shifting, strange biological properties. This is formed by lichen-like, detritivorous plants that float around the exterior of the star system like a protective shell, consuming any detritus that passes through them. While the whole of this realm is a mostly isolated system, it is constantly evolving and changing, as evolutionary processes work rapidly within, allowing significant adaptations to occur across species even within a single generation. The many diverse planets in this system - which seem to possess every ecosystem imaginable, from storm-wracked worlds to volcanic wastelands to vast jungles - are almost overpopulated with life, with a single planet containing more unique specimens than can be found in entire star systems elsewhere. While breathtakingly beautiful, merely entering the system can be hazardous, due to the severe levels of radiation emitted by the system's star, to say nothing of the countless varieties of predators and other environmental hazards that exist among its planets and moons and the space between them.

If one is cunning and strong enough to adapt to and overcome this realm's many adversities, they can find Yaraesa's sacred laboratory-monastery on the single moon orbiting the planet closest to the system's star. From here, one has access to limitless resources, environmental conditions, and computation or labor assistance to conduct any scientific experiment imaginable. Due to the rapidly changing nature of the world, experiments that would otherwise take decades may take only weeks or even days here, allowing for incredible scientific discoveries to be made with rapid frequency. Unlike other gods with a domain in knowledge, Yaraesa's libraries have a prevailing bent towards skepticism rather than certainty. The stores of knowledge are not so much encyclopaedic as they are records of the many scientific experiments conducted within the laboratory, often with unclear or unfinished results. In consequence, learning anything useful here tends to require significant amounts of time replicating experiments to determine their validity - refining and improving the wealth of knowledge Yaraesa has allowed to accumulate over the eons.

Talavet:

Talavet has inherited the Harrowed Realm, instilling order in this formerly chaotic, leaderless plane - granting its countless denizens a new identity, respect for tradition, and role to play in the tales she weaves through the stories told by her mortal acolytes. In light of this, the demiplane has expanded considerably, and is now accessible through many more means than a Deck of Harrowing Tales. Heroic myths and Aesop's Fables-like narratives are in vogue in the Harrowed Realm right now, representing idealized depictions of families, ancestry, traditions and folk legends that offer a comfort and inspiration to those still struggling from a tremendous loss of identity inflicted by the Gap.

Weydan:

Weydan's sacred realm is his own starship, which is basically the Starship Enterprise, traveling the galaxy in search of new life and new civilizations. The starship itself is manned either by varying avatars of himself, or the various stragglers he's picked up throughout his journeys what piqued his interest. It is almost indistinguishable from a mundane, mortal-manned starship - even to those mortals already aboard.

Ibra:

Ibra's sacred domain is the cosmos itself. It's all sacred - no one place more than any other.

[Metaphysician]

All very cool ideas. Here are a few of mine:

Hylax:

Spoiler:

I likewise place her as absolutely in Heaven, and always has been. Its just the obvious place. I imagine her realm resembling a cross between a bee hive and a cathedral, everything a glorious flurry of cooperation between individuals. If we were using Planescape rules, it'd be like the best possible incarnation of Arcadia.

The Devourer:

Spoiler:

Having recently learned about the existence of Eternity's Doorstep, I can't help but imagine that the Devourer's realm is in the Negative Energy Plane. I haven't worked out all the dynamics for how the mostly-quiescent Eternity's Doorstep somehow woke up, but its too good an image to pass up. There probably are black holes that serve as direct portals to this realm, however, and you'd want to avoid them even more than normal black holes. Nothing comes out of this realm, either in the "no exit" sense, or the "walking mass of non-existence" sense.

Yaraesa:

Spoiler:

I actually peg her realm as being in Nirvana, fitting with her alignment. Note that she is very specifically neutral good, and about the benefits of seeking knowledge as a path to enlightenment. Its basically the most utopian 50s sci-fi city possible, buildings of gleaming metal and glass interspersed through lush green gardens and parks, everything being libraries and schools and laboratories. As gods go, she's very down to earth, constantly interacting and working with the countless outsiders and petitioners and even mortals who inhabit the halls of knowledge.

Grandmother Rat:

Spoiler:

So, canonically, Grandmother Rat had her realm in Abaddon. Of course, in the Pathfinder era, she also was the goddess of theft in Tian Xia, not necessarily in the larger world. What changed? Well, a lot of things. It certainly didn't help Norgorber's position that most of his followers vanished with Golarion. It didn't help Norgorber's position either that he does not get along well with others. So after the Gap, what did Grandmother Rat do?

She pulled a coup. Basically, she organized her followers, stole his resources, waged a shadow war to kill his minions, quietly dropped diplomatic overtures to relevant deities, and then presented Norgorber with a deal he couldn't refuse: he could give up the Axis undercity to her, or he could lose everything. And because Norgorber was stuck with no options ( I specifically imagine that Abadar was enthusiastically eager to swap to a God of Rogues who did not embrace psychopathic serial killers ), he grudgingly relented. So Grandmother Rat? Her realm is still largely similar in contents and aesthetics, but its now under Axis. But hey, as a consolation prize, she did offer Norgorber some nice prime real estate in Abaddon in exchange. . .

Eloritu:

Spoiler:

Pretty much the same as you. His realm's location is a total mystery. There's a ton of theories, but even the best theories only have enough evidence to make them plausible, not definite. Even those who've verifiably visited it have no idea where it is, or even if they perceived its true nature as opposed to just a testing chamber for mystery-seekers.

The most popular theories are "Its deep underneath the Boneyard, a secret dating back to creation", "Its hidden in the astral, amongst all the floating thoughts and ideas", and "Its located in a single anonymous material plane solar system, where its essentially impossible to find". You can find people proposing that its in the Abyss, Axis, the Positive Energy Plane, or any other locale you can name, however. There's even the theory that Eloritu as such doesn't even exist, and that all alleged visits to his 'realm' are fake.