Do the people on Golarion acutally refer to aliens as "aliens"?


Lost Omens Campaign Setting General Discussion


Or do they call them something like "things from the Dark Tapestry?"

Liberty's Edge

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IIRC alien means other. If people on Golarion have a strong sense of planetary identity, which would make sense with all those ancestries sharing so many experiences on Golarion, I can perfectly see them use aliens in the meaning of Not from Golarion.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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They would, unless they called them "mosnters" or "demons" or whatever. Likewise, I could see folks calling some things aliens that aren't. It's certainly a word that the real world uses to denote things like Dark Tapestry stuff, so it's important for us to be able to communicate to the reader that concept as well. Having it be a term that is used in-world is just easier.


People on Golarion don't speak English, and Golarion has a wide array of different kinds of people. So there's probably some sort of word for "stranger" that would be used for people from another planet, but also some kind of uncommon ancestry from a different continent.

Since it's kind of impossible for somebody in the game would to be able to tell that a Lashunta (which looks kind of like a person with antennae) is an alien but a Conrasu (a weird walking wood thing) isn't. Or the difference between two Ysoki, one who is originally from Akiton and one who is from Golarion. I mean, Elves are aliens but largely normalized, but Goloma are native to the planet but are very strange.

So it's mostly about a "howdy stranger" sort of thing without making a lot of assumptions about the sapient being you're speaking to.

If the thing is actually dangerous and/or hostile, it doesn't matter so much whether it's an aberration, or an outsider, or whatever.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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They don't speak English, but everything we write about them and folks read about is in English (or via a translation into another real-world language). As such, the word they'd use for "stranger from another planet" should be the same one that we use. "Alien" in the case of English. Or perhaps a synonym like "offworlder" or "extraterrestrial" or the like.

We try to avoid making up brand new words for concepts that already exist in the language we work with, because that makes it easier for readers to understand what we're talking about, and makes it easier on our editors.

For sure someone might call a conrasu an alien if they didn't know better, or assume a lashunta is a local. Since Golarion is a setting with a LOT more fantasy in it, I think that the concept of automatically assuming an unusual creature is an alien is a lot less prevalent than it would be here if we ran into an elf on the street. "Monster" is probably the best generic word for "there's something I don't recognize" that folks use in Golarion. But those who know, including folks who live in regions like Numeria where the concept is more well-known, would potentially suspect aliens.

Liberty's Edge

Extragolarional.

Terre is Earth ;-D

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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The Raven Black wrote:

Extragolarional.

Terre is Earth ;-D

By the same reason we didn't rename it the Plane of Golarion, or talk about golarionquakes, we won't be making up words like "Extragolraional."

Remember, this stuff is written by earthlings to be read by earthlings. We make up enough new stuff as it is without making the learning about this different world tougher than it is by inventing an entirely new language to publish it in.


The Raven Black wrote:

Extragolarional.

Terre is Earth ;-D

Even before applying translation convention, it could just be interpreted as "not from the land we live on". Terra in Latin can mean "soil" or "land", similar to the lower-case use of the word "earth" in English.


Do people on Golarion generally understand "Golarion is an oblate spheroid planet that orbits a star, and there are other planets roughly the same shape also orbiting the same star some of which are closer to the star, and some of which are further away"?

Like sufficiently powerful magic users can just visit other planets, but every sufficiently powerful magic user knows a whole lot of things that like "random townspeople" do not understand.

My gut feeling would be that the average farmer, cabinetmaker, or miller just doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about cosmology even if the stars are pretty. But that would also suggest they might believe a lot of strange (and wrong) things.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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PossibleCabbage wrote:
Do people on Golarion generally understand "Golarion is an oblate spheroid planet that orbits a star, and there are other planets roughly the same shape also orbiting the same star some of which are closer to the star, and some of which are further away"?

They generally do, yes.


Well, people in our world Medieval period generally understood the Earth to be a sphere, or at least round. I can't speak for the average peasant's understand but it seems probable, if perhaps not from a scientifically accurate perspective. At the least I could see Sarenrae and Desna's clergy teaching a basic image of the cosmos as a part of their preaching, particularly owing to their goddesses' roles in the formation of the heavens.

In particular, heliocentrism may be more common on Golarion owing to the direct association of the sun with their goddess, which would corroborate well with the idea that life on other planets is similarly sustained by their goddess' light. (though I consider it unlikely that the factual existence of life on other planets is common knowledge to human civilizations not around a portal or Numeria)

EDIT: Beaten by 40 seconds by the Rex himself. Nice.


Sure, I buy that like the Sarenrite church and the Desnan church teaches people about cosmology. The followers of the Good deities are going to generally want you to know the truth about things.

But aren't the followers of the evil religions just as likely to deliberately lie about things? Like "Golarion actually revolves around Asmodeus wherever he happens to be" or "all of the planets are hung from hooks of pure darkness through the south pole and move by the whims of Zon-Kuthon."

From conspiracy theorists in the real world we see it's hard enough to disabuse people of some truly bat**** notions that are empirically falsifiable, so shouldn't this sort of thing also be going on when you have actual supernatural beings pushing it?

Liberty's Edge

Staying purposefully behind other countries in education is a sure way for a country to fail pretty fast.

The best way to succeed is high education merged with lots of propaganda / accent on beliefs.

After all, Zon-Kuthon is the bearer of the cosmic truth of things, he has nothing to fear from knowledge. Disloyalty is the real enemy.


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It's certainly possible that people believe whatever. This actually has very little to do with evil religions, imho, since there are all kinds of motivations for charlatans, snake-oil salespeople, and other to mislead a populace about the nature of reality for their own esoteric or material gain. I expect there are a healthy variety of evil deities who desire to spread misinformation, but they'd only be part of a myriad of liars and con artists.

There's probably the question of motivation, too. What would the evil religion have to gain from spreading misinformation? There are probably a few deities of misinformation waging a secret war with the deities (probably a monitor demigod) of accurate record-keeping etc. but for many evil deities, their attentions are presumably more on getting people to follow their own philosophy than on making stuff up about the shape of the planet or nature of the heavens.

Aside from that, you have to consider the dominant cultural influences. Even given an evil deity committed to spreading false information about the cosmos, in order to disseminate these lies throughout a population, you'd have to have some manner of influence. If the priest at your local church says that Desna created the heavens and Sarenrae's light brought life to the world, you'll probably believe her. If somebody tells you differently, it's their word against the entire institution, and maybe they convince you somehow, but maybe they get run out of town for spreading lies or blasphemy.

I mean, Asmodeus' religion does teach that he and his brother were the first gods. All this is just to say that I don't assume false information is more prevalent on Golarion because of evil religions than it would be in real life. At worst, the influence of evil deities would be lost among all the other, mundane liars bending people's beliefs about the nature of the universe to their ends.

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