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This changes everything. No longer can we assume that the denizens of Geb are all evil just because they happen to be undead.
I mean, they’re still the beneficiaries of a state that has a massive apparatus of living, unwilling humanoids kept as food. I think they’re largely pretty complicit.
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The nation of Geb is evil, that's pretty clear. Not everyone who lives there is Evil. The same can be said about Cheliax.
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This changes everything. No longer can we assume that the denizens of Geb are all evil just because they happen to be undead.
I think that nations shouldn't ever be given alignments; instead statblocks should list their leaders and the alignments of those leaders.
Also the setting lore has explained why, even if Geb is led by Evil people, attacking it is a bad idea with unintended consequences.
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Specially when the math is so tight that even just having a climb/fly speed is problematic.
That has nothing to do with system math, it is just plugging existing design issues with granting bypass mechanics as universal abilities so early in the game, permanent fly being a double whammy of also being a combat balance issue (but not one rooted in system math).
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If anything I expect the number of Good undead to increase with the rise of Arazni, basically having a patron and sponsor for them (as well as Tanagaar as Keftiu points out).This also mirrors real life social movements in a neat way. A very important step to making change is having the language to describe it and/or examples to follow. Merely having visible examples of redemption is going to inspire others to the same.
I think that if redemption could come easily to undead, it would have been the case already in the long story of the setting.
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I think that if redemption could come easily to undead, it would have been the case already in the long story of the setting.If anything I expect the number of Good undead to increase with the rise of Arazni, basically having a patron and sponsor for them (as well as Tanagaar as Keftiu points out).This also mirrors real life social movements in a neat way. A very important step to making change is having the language to describe it and/or examples to follow. Merely having visible examples of redemption is going to inspire others to the same.
I mean Paizo has admitted that for a large part of the time the story was a huge mess and it's a good idea not to cite early stuff it could easily change.
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I mean, Arazni herself has not been redeemed, her granting powers to CG worshippers is merely an indication that she's amenable to the idea. Arazni herself is a little overfond of "I want to hurt those who hurt me" to be anything other than Evil at this point, but her story isn't over.
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I mean, Arazni herself has not been redeemed, her granting powers to CG worshippers is merely an indication that she's amenable to the idea. Arazni herself is a little overfond of "I want to hurt those who hurt me" to be anything other than Evil at this point, but her story isn't over.
It's a story I expect to see across a good chunk of 2e, and I'm super excited for it.
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I mean, there's the thing about using negative energy in place of the positive energy that normally animates things tends to drive things towards evil since negative energy is a destructive force and you're running it through patterns not intended for it. Which is why undead default to evil.Here the cause and the effect are actually reversed in the real world. The devs needed to justify making undead always evil (then contradicting themselves with ghosts, revenants and other exceptions) so they invented the 'explanation' above. And now they would have to contradict themselves again with non-evil undead PCs (if they would be introduced) or retcon the lore. It's a mess.
An exception is not a contradiction.
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Even benevolent undead always eventually becoming evil with enough time Kind of reminds me of the anime series, The 8th Son? Are You Kidding Me?
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A couple of relevant quotes from James Jacobs in regards to good aligned undead.
We've had good undead for years. They are just very very rare.
We've never really had robust rules for undead PCs at all, because in the previous edition, their huge amount of immunities and lack of 6 ability scores made them difficult, if not impossible, to balance.
Since 2nd edition undead have Constitution scores, and since they aren't blanket-immune to all mind-affecting things and poison and other afflictions, they're more balanced as an option for a PC ancestry.
Those rules will allow for any alignment of undead, I suspect, but they'll come with lore explaining why and how it's uncommon or illogical for some of them to be good aligned while still featuring the tropes that make them popular choices in the first place.
We don't gatelock alignments in 2nd edition for players often, though. When we present options for ancestries we provide guidelines, but there aren't requirements that you play a specific alignment.
That changes for some classes, particularly things like clerics, but that's because their job requires a certain philosophical outlook. But since classes are things your character has agency to choose, having alignment restrictions there are part of the fun (when alignment restrictions make sense—note we've dramatically rolled back alignment restrictions for most classes!). For ancestry, which your character doesn't have agency to choose (that's your choice, not an in-game choice your character makes), it's important for us to NOT hard-code alignments in.
And keep in mind that just because there are rules for undead PCs, and those rules allow any alignment, that doesn't mean suddenly all undead NPCs in the game become equally distributed across all nine alignments. The introduction of player ancestry options for undead won't change the in-world lore for non PC undead. That remains the same—most are evil. Some are not (note that in 2nd edition, void zombies and revenants aren't evil, and ghosts have always been all over the place on alignment).
Souls are essentially the raw material to keep the Outer Planes a thing. They're constantly being eroded away by the Maelstrom (which erodes itself as much as anything else), so that once there's no more souls going through the system, all of reality goes into much more rapid decay and then eventually collapses on itself to restart a new cycle... hopefully!
When a soul is taken out of that system by becoming undead, it quickens that decay.
Put another way, "souls" are the energy on which reality functions, and when you take that away, reality fails.
And put another way, souls are water, and they gather in an ocean and go on a cycle of evaporation and reintroduction into the system, and every drop of water you destroy or remove entirely from the system makes it that much closer to the end of the world. A soul that becomes undead is like taking a drop of water and removing it from reality.
If everything went undead, then it'd be a matter of time (probably on a vast scale) before the underlying structure of reality simply failed and all would end.
Location is irrelevant if it's all part of the same reality, so it doesn't matter if the lich lives on Golarion or the Maelstrom or anywhere else.
Even good aligned undead cause this problem, which is why good aligned undead are so rare. A good undead who understands this issue is likely at some point to sacrifice themself, if they can, for reality's greater good, which only FURTHER makes them more rare.
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An exception is not a contradiction.
Here the cause and the effect are actually reversed in the real world. The devs needed to justify making undead always evil (then contradicting themselves with ghosts, revenants and other exceptions) so they invented the 'explanation' above. And now they would have to contradict themselves again with non-evil undead PCs (if they would be introduced) or retcon the lore. It's a mess.When you are using absolutes an 'exception' is exactly a contradiction. And this reads like absolutes:
The tragedy of undeath is that it perverts negative energy outside its natural role of destruction and forces it to create. The result is a being with a horrifying emptiness filled only by a connection to that subverted need to destroy, full of instincts and subconscious urges from the corrupted essence that inexorably twist it to evil. <..> Many become evil almost right away, but those with the willpower and virtue to stave it off are still doomed, with time, to change.'inxonarably' and 'doomed' don't really allow exceptions.
The only possible catch here is that this is an in-universe text, and the author (Marquise Cordelia Perseis, whoever that is) could be just wrong.
Could be yes, In-universe texts aren’t absolutes.
Also “doomed to eventually turn evil” does not make the exceptional Good undead a contradiction. They are good, they might eventually turn Evil. There’s not an absolute or dismissal of Good undead.
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Thank you very much Nephandys ( so much interesting )!
Now my doubts are:
-Mindless Undeads: When a living being dies, its soul goes to pharasma, waiting to be judged. If later ( let's say 1 year ago ) the deceased body is used as raw material to create a zombie, skeleton, or any other mindless undead, would this affect its lost soul in any way?
If not, this would be an issue if everything went "sentient" undead, rather than just undead ( because the mindless one wouldn't deal any harm to the soul process ).
This leads to my next question:
-Soul Power: Does any soul has its own weight in the soul process? or, for example, the soul of a high wizard, turned into a lich, is going to have more value than a common farmer's?
To the second question: That seems to likely be the case. There's a ritual that involves sacrificing exceptionally perfect souls that can harm a god.
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Thank you very much Nephandys ( so much interesting )!
Now my doubts are:
-Mindless Undeads: When a living being dies, its soul goes to pharasma, waiting to be judged. If later ( let's say 1 year ago ) the deceased body is used as raw material to create a zombie, skeleton, or any other mindless undead, would this affect its lost soul in any way?
If not, this would be an issue if everything went "sentient" undead, rather than just undead (because the mindless one wouldn't deal any harm to the soul process)
To answer the first question, I believe JJ has clarified his intent that the create undead ritual tears off or otherwise harms at least a part of the original soul belonging to the vessel you are animating (if not the whole), even in the case of mindless, soulless undead. It's not clear what the limit on this is. It would seem like a judged soul probably can't be harmed by any lingering attachment to its body, since neither can it be resurrected. On the other hand, the time it takes to get processed is implied to be long enough that most corpses would have decayed at least to skeletons or less before you could pick 'em
My 2 cents are that undead lost that warm feeling you get when help your man or pet a stray kitten. Undead, I presume, are biologically incapable of empathy, so rationalizing their actions becomes ever more tempting (similar to Vampires in WoD).
There could be good/ neutral undead, but they would need a motive that varies from good feels good. Think of Paarthurnax from TES V: Skyrim.
My issue with Undead archetypes is that it would overlap with class archetypes. Your Runelord or wellspring oracle would have to revert to
regular wizard or oracle, for example.
Then again this could be avoided if the transformation gives you a bonus feat with most of the drawbacks and few benefits and the rest of the archetype is you mitigating the drawbacks and/ or gaining more abilities or benefits.
My issue with Undead archetypes is that it would overlap with class archetypes. Your Runelord or wellspring oracle would have to revert to
regular wizard or oracle, for example.If the goal is to give a more significative archetype than the current damphir ( in terms of power and possibilities ), then it's the right path to follow.
Also take into account wellspring and runelord are already rare, and unavailable to the majority of tables, so this won't be an issue at all ( stacking different rare stuff would break, eventually, the balance. So if you are up to get a rare ancestry with 2 rare archetypes, you'd probably better also accept playing with FA rules or similar ).
Just a reminder since I myself missed it. The vampire templates already in PF2 give all the relevant abilities of the different vampire species.
The likely case is that they plan on creating something stronger than Dhampir, but weaker than an actual vampire.
Also to me it seems like these archetypes will overlap will all archetypes. Which if true would be very restrictive.
When you say weaker than a vampire are you saying that the vampire PC (with class features on top of vampire features) will be weaker than a vampire of CR equal to that single party member? (not an on level vampire bc that's a creature that 4 PCs would fight)
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A vampire PC level X (if built strong) should be as strong as a vampire NPC level X, except their power sort of has to manifest in different ways, with the PC likely having more breadth and tactical options with all that equipment.
As JJ wrote in the quote above, it's about vampire tropes, not specific NPC vampire mechanics. Of course "as strong" means PCs will likely die if they've spent resources already, and likely live (unlive?) if their abilities match well against the NPC's (sort of like paper-scissors-rock as the NPC might have the advantage there).
I mean, one thing that does track with this is that in popular media a heroic vampire character frequently has things like their vulnerability to sunlight etc, their various compulsions, and weaknesses as well as their various vampire-specific abilities downplayed.
So you have things like "infrequent need to feed, a trenchcoat and tinted windows protect you from the sun, you can turn into a bat or a wolf but you don't do a lot of mind control or turn into mist to slip under doors."