I think Nethys seems like the most likely candidate.
Creative Director
|
| 8 people marked this as a favorite. |
Further info:
Alaznist worked with various demon lords but didn't really worship them; she saw them as equals.
Belimarius wasn't religious, really, although she was certainly jealous of the gods' power.
Karzoug wasn't particularly religious, but often found himself allying with various churches as it met his needs.
Sorshen has something of an alliance of mutual respect with Nocticula, moreso now that they've both moved on from evil, but before didn't really have much time or interest in matters of faith.
Zutha didn't worship anyone.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Didn't Nethys not ascend until after Earthfall?
EDIT: Yeah, Nethys ascended during the Age of Destiny, the first age after the Age of Darkness. Interestingly, that makes Nethys the oldest Ascended divinity, at least from the mortal races.
|
Creative Director
|
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
Didn't Nethys not ascend until after Earthfall?
EDIT: Yeah, Nethys ascended during the Age of Destiny, the first age after the Age of Darkness. Interestingly, that makes Nethys the oldest Ascended divinity, at least from the mortal races.
Gorum and Urgathoa might have words with you about that claim... Maybe. Or maybe not. Once you go that far back into history, things get weird.
Ah, forgot Urgathoa. But wasn't Gorum essentially the spirit of battle? I didn't know he was supposedly once mortal. Is that new?
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Ah, forgot Urgathoa. But wasn't Gorum essentially the spirit of battle? I didn't know he was supposedly once mortal. Is that new?
[tangent] Everybody forgets Urgathoa! Her ascension is said to have caused the existence of *disease* on the mortal plane, so she's got to be pretty old (older than the Horsemen, which seems odd, since they treat her like a guest in *their* plane...).
Divine Anthology has a book with a chapter celebrating each of the ascended gods, Iomedae, Irori, Cayden, Norgorber and Nethys, but skips Urgathoa entirely, which makes me want to have an unofficial sixth chapter, 'the Prime Immortal,' dedicated to her by a priest angry that she was slighted by this omission. :) [/tangent]
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Also, poor Zyphus is forgotten even then. I mean, if he was the first accidental death... that had to have been pretty ancient for that to work.
I think I was just thinking about mortals who directly became deities, rather than first dying.
*shrug*
It just feels like cheating is all. Like your divinity comes not from your own work, but simply because, through cosmic coincidence, you were the first to do something.
Urgathoa and Zyphus should be older than life on Golarion, tbh.
|
Creative Director
|
| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
Urgathoa and Zyphus should be older than life on Golarion, tbh.
Since you have to have life first before you can have death (or undeath), that doesn't make too much sense to me. Unless you were implying that you'd rather have Urgathoa and Zyphus become established on another planet that's older than Golarion.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Further info:
{. . .}
Sorshen {. . .}
Faved, but at the same time you might want a Rise of the Runelords spoiler tag for that.
Ah, forgot Urgathoa. But wasn't Gorum essentially the spirit of battle? I didn't know he was supposedly once mortal. Is that new?
Gorum sounds to me an awful lot like an ascended Graveknight.
Urgathoa and Zyphus should be older than life on Golarion, tbh.Since you have to have life first before you can have death (or undeath), that doesn't make too much sense to me. Unless you were implying that you'd rather have Urgathoa and Zyphus become established on another planet that's older than Golarion.
This is the same lack of understanding of history and scale that led to the weird timeline on Golarion.
If Urgathoa and Zyphus are really the first sentient creatures to get mad at Pharasma's judgment in their particular circumstances then it boggles the mind to believe that they aren't billions of years old and predate humanity (and the formation of Golarion's solar system), and they only have a 1/2,000,000,000,000 chance to have even originated in the same galaxy as Golarion.
The alternative is that they're minor gods in a cosmic sense and just another fruit fly flash in the pan like Aroden and the other Golarion derived gods, rather than really mattering on a universal level like Pharasma, Asmodeus, and maybe Desna.
Original undead for all of existence is a big deal, and makes Urgathoa really impressive. Original undead on Golarion is chump territory. Original undead for all of existence who also somehow managed to happen on Golarion and so late in the development of the universe is...unlikely.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
It's also not impossible that Golarion is the first mortal world, though. Rovagug was imprisoned there, after all, and the planet is clearly experiencing development slower than Earth, not to mention that, given the nature of Golarion as a clearly created cosmos (rather than natural), the multiverse is likely far younger than the estimated lifespan of our own universe. In that way, it's quite possible that Golarion did indeed host the first life (and thus death), making their gods cosmological-scale entities.
It's also not impossible that Golarion is the first mortal world, though. Rovagug was imprisoned there, after all, and the planet is clearly experiencing development slower than Earth, not to mention that, given the nature of Golarion as a clearly created cosmos (rather than natural), the multiverse is likely far younger than the estimated lifespan of our own universe. In that way, it's quite possible that Golarion did indeed host the first life (and thus death), making their gods cosmological-scale entities.
They've foreclosed that by putting Earth in the same universe and setting the current Golarion timeline equal to 1920s Earth. You have to make a whole lot of really dumb assumptions to not have the current era billions of years after the first life in the universe, given the rampant evolution of life all over the place.
Rovagug's rampage is by necessity a very late development in the history of the material plane to this point. I do like to pretend that he destroyed most of the two trillion other galaxies out there, though, before they finally stopped him. It limits the outer planar scale issues by a few orders of magnitude, even if it can't solve them.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Not exactly, though. Here's a few possible ways that it could still work (none of which entirely violate canon):
Golarion has had humans for untold ages. Like, billions of years ago. We know that 50 million years ago, it had dinosaurs and the like dominating, but we don't know exactly when humans first came about. They could well have been living then, as well, and had been for millions of years. Perhaps the unlikliest of the bunch, but it's possible.
Golarion is the oldest planet in the universe, but due to a unique set of conditions, it's traveling at a speed close to the speed of light, thus time on it is much slower relative to the bulk of the universe, thanks to relativity, and so the time it has felt since the universe started is much lower than elsewhere. This one gets muggy because Outer Sphere stuff and Earth-time equivalence, but whatever. This is a setting with teleportation and time travel.
Sentient life is actually a really, really new thing. Like the cosmos is ancient, but the gods only finally got around to making sentient life in the last few million years, and Golarion was the starting place.
Or maybe, the universe is relatively young, and the gods just dropped a ton of evidence for an old universe to disguise just how stinking long it took them to put down Rovagug.
|
Further info:
Alaznist worked with various demon lords but didn't really worship them; she saw them as equals.
Belimarius wasn't religious, really, although she was certainly jealous of the gods' power.
Karzoug wasn't particularly religious, but often found himself allying with various churches as it met his needs.
Sorshen has something of an alliance of mutual respect with Nocticula, moreso now that they've both moved on from evil, but before didn't really have much time or interest in matters of faith.
Zutha didn't worship anyone.
Alderpash used to worship Baphomet. He doesn't any more. Gone off him recently (and not much there to worship). May even have converted to Iomedae if it gets him out.
Not exactly, though. Here's a few possible ways that it could still work (none of which entirely violate canon):
Golarion has had humans for untold ages. Like, billions of years ago. We know that 50 million years ago, it had dinosaurs and the like dominating, but we don't know exactly when humans first came about. They could well have been living then, as well, and had been for millions of years. Perhaps the unlikliest of the bunch, but it's possible.
Golarion is the oldest planet in the universe, but due to a unique set of conditions, it's traveling at a speed close to the speed of light, thus time on it is much slower relative to the bulk of the universe, thanks to relativity, and so the time it has felt since the universe started is much lower than elsewhere. This one gets muggy because Outer Sphere stuff and Earth-time equivalence, but whatever. This is a setting with teleportation and time travel.
Sentient life is actually a really, really new thing. Like the cosmos is ancient, but the gods only finally got around to making sentient life in the last few million years, and Golarion was the starting place.
Or maybe, the universe is relatively young, and the gods just dropped a ton of evidence for an old universe to disguise just how stinking long it took them to put down Rovagug.
Like I said, it can only be done with a bunch of really dumb assumptions.
Right.... but we have a fact:
Urgathoa/Zyphus were the first beings to reject Pharasma’s judgement. With that as our base, it will naturally lead us to an unlikely result, but that has to be the answer.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
^Do we know for sure that they were the first beings to reject Pharasma's judgment? It could be just that they were the first to reject Pharasma's judgment and manage to live or unlive to tell the tale.
That is, admittedly, also a possibility (well, at least for Urgathoa. Zyphys is explicitly stated as being the first truly meaningless death), but not one that significantly affects the rest of the situations leading up to it. They still would have had to have been one of the first to do so, and maintains the high improbability of coming from Golarion.
Hasn't the universe been through several creation/destruction cycles and Pharasma has been around through at least one? It's possible Urgathoa/Zyphus predate the universe Golarion exists in.
|
Creative Director
|
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Hasn't the universe been through several creation/destruction cycles and Pharasma has been around through at least one? It's possible Urgathoa/Zyphus predate the universe Golarion exists in.
They don't. The whole point of the creation/destruction cycle is that it drastically limits the amount of "carryover" between cycles.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
^ Hmm...
Evidence for the presence of an ancient civilisation in what came to be Sumer is more & more pushing back to at least 6,000 BC. The date you're using only represents the first written records from the region (although that date is being pushed closer to the 3,500 BC mark as a result of more recent discoveries/research...).
While Golarion's earliest civilisations would still be older by at least a millennium, they were given a jump start by aboleth-intervention, so...
<shrug>
Do we even know for sure that Urgathoa was a human? She may be represented as such by modern humans, and it seems that's how she appears to them, but that doesn't have to mean anything. I wouldn't be surprised if other races perceived her as a member of their race.
|
Creative Director
|
| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
Do we even know for sure that Urgathoa was a human? She may be represented as such by modern humans, and it seems that's how she appears to them, but that doesn't have to mean anything. I wouldn't be surprised if other races perceived her as a member of their race.
I do. She was. :-P
|
Do we even know for sure that Urgathoa was a human? She may be represented as such by modern humans, and it seems that's how she appears to them, but that doesn't have to mean anything. I wouldn't be surprised if other races perceived her as a member of their race.I do. She was. :-P
But was she a Golarion human ?
Or was she born on Earth ?
Come to think of it, do Neanderthal count as human in PFRPG ? What about Homo Erectus ?
IIRC we had a primitive human "race" released by Paizo a few years back.
|
Creative Director
|
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Do we even know for sure that Urgathoa was a human? She may be represented as such by modern humans, and it seems that's how she appears to them, but that doesn't have to mean anything. I wouldn't be surprised if other races perceived her as a member of their race.I do. She was. :-PBut was she a Golarion human ?
Or was she born on Earth ?
Come to think of it, do Neanderthal count as human in PFRPG ? What about Homo Erectus ?
IIRC we had a primitive human "race" released by Paizo a few years back.
In my headcanon, she was an Androffan human.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
8,088 BC is when those civilizations fell, meaning their rise was much older than that, and they may not even be the first civilizations.^ Hmm...
Evidence for the presence of an ancient civilisation in what came to be Sumer is more & more pushing back to at least 6,000 BC. The date you're using only represents the first written records from the region (although that date is being pushed closer to the 3,500 BC mark as a result of more recent discoveries/research...).
While Golarion's earliest civilisations would still be older by at least a millennium, they were given a jump start by aboleth-intervention, so...
<shrug>
<sigh>
My apologies if it seemed like I was invalidating your post.
I wasn't contradicting your point on the antiquity of human civilisations on Golarion & how they most likely predate human civilisations on Earth (at least as revealed in canon, so far).
I was disputing your assertion that one of the earliest human civilisations on Earth (Sumer) only dates to 3,100 BC when it was considerably much earlier than that.
In my headcanon, she was an Androffan human.
So how many human civilizations are there in the PF universe? Ones that appear to have either evolved separately or been created by a deity/deities. Ex: Golarion, Androffa, Earth.
|
Creative Director
|
| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
In my headcanon, she was an Androffan human.So how many human civilizations are there in the PF universe? Ones that appear to have either evolved separately or been created by a deity/deities. Ex: Golarion, Androffa, Earth.
As many as we want/need there to be, and since we will never know that number until the very last product we publish, it makes no sense for us to nail that number down.
There are a lot though.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
There are a lot though.
Makes the universe a bit more interesting when something weird is going on.