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I mean even then farming communities' cultural beliefs aren't universal globally even if some things are similar <_< Like contrary to popular belief, not all cultures on Earth have been patriarchal traditionally.
Though that is still getting off the point, I'm somehow getting feeling that Erastil isn't supposed to be divine version of "That conservative grumpy grandpa who you have awkward conversations with at dinner table when family meets"
Creative Director
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The introduction of mysoginistic elements to Erastil's lore was an error, and the article in Rivers Run Red is out of date and no longer applies to the deity. That incorrect informaiton was fixed in Inner Sea Gods going forward, but Paizo's lack of a formal way to handle lore errata and corrections (as opposed to rules errata) makes it difficult/impossible to efficiently broadcast those changes. So I'll keep popping into threads like these, I guess, to make them as needed.
As with all RPG content, feel free to adjust things for your table, but Erastil, who I created back in the late 80s/early 90s, was always intended to be a god of community and family and agriculture and hunting—rolls that any family member/any gender can excel in. The error that crept into print was introduced by a flawed process resulting from us being understaffed and still scrambling to recover from the launch of the Pathfinder RPG in the first place.
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It is probably a good idea to listen to and then trust the creative director when they take time out of their day to address misconceptions about the lore. Thank you James!
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I mean, the thing about a God being hardline on gender roles doesn't really even make sense since gender roles are going to vary from society to society and a God isn't just going to be aware of different countries they're going to be aware of different planets.
Erastil is likely aware of how the Vesk and the Shirren and how several different Androffan cultures perceived gender and it would be bizarre if it was the same everywhere.
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“Women shouldn’t do X, Y or Z” is prejudicial, by definition.
It was an error. Lawful Good deities don’t do that. End of story.
Discussions about “real world cultures” and how it’s been justified before are irrelevant. It’s not how things are in Golarion and trying to argue it is is like trying to undo a rules errata because you preferred it the old way:
Do what you like at home, but the canon is clear. These errors weren’t “edginess” they were mistakes.
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Also again, the Erastil in the article showed classic conservative hypocritical misogyny
"Why should man be charge of household?"
"Because he has strong will."
"Well what about strong willed women?"
"You should marry them off, strong willed women cause problems, they need man to put them in their place"
How the heck that isn't misogyny or thinking woman as lesser?
It is also ok for lore errata to reflect the growth of writers and the world they want to create. Like if a mechanical rule was preventing some people from being able to access the game, like maybe requiring a player to do 100 sit ups in 5 minutes in order to be able to earn a hero point, I’d hope that would get written out of the game too.
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It's been a while since a good faith counterargument has been fielded in this thread (perhaps not even on this page--I've lost track), so we may have moved beyond the point of debate, but I wanted to throw my at into the ring anyway.
The thing about the Lost Omens setting is that things like Good and Evil are objective, almost elemental forces in the cosmos. Gods are some of the highest embodiments of those forces in the setting by virtue of their divinity and position. This means that if a god acts or espouses and ideology, that act or ideology either:
a) is a mistake, whether because the gods are indeed flawed and sometimes do things they canonically regret, or because the lore itself was published in error, as with Erastil's outdated bigotry
or
b) is endorsed by the authors of the setting as being consistent with their alignment (whether Good or Evil) and therefore officially being endorsed by the universe of the game as objectively good or evil.
There are plenty of morally grey deities who do morally grey things, but by definition their morals are Neutral at best unless the narrative in question is written in such a way as confirms the author's intent that a Good god's questionable act is indeed an error in their judgment and is not consistent with the universal standard of Goodness (which again in this setting is an objective force). Of course, the campaign setting as a whole must by necessity exist outside of a given narrative, and so must its characters.
Finally, the fantasy world of Golarion does not exist in a vacuum, completely isolated from the real world. Allegedly, real people from the modern world play this game, so if something which negatively affects real people in the modern world is given authorial endorsement as being a 'Good' act, it is very little different from the authors announcing their support for these acts, whether blatant misogyny or helping the poor. This goes most strongly for issues which affect real people and less strongly for issues which do not. If Golarion were a world where the gods were explicitly petty, vindictive, or morally neutral, that would be a very different scenario (and again, there are many gods like that), but it is a world where certain gods and their beliefs are referred to by the creators as Good and others as Evil.