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The Mythic AP might be to find and destroy TB's soul cage which would absolutely prevent Tar-Baphon from menacing the countryside as he has more pressing issues (finding his soul and putting it back in the box). It's "wherever Urgathoa put it" so it's probably not anywhere safe for less than mythic people. Plus, I imagine they have a fun answer to "nobody even knows what it is" that they'd like to make public eventually.
well... i mean... I know where it is ;-)
but then again... I'm the DM.
It's just that if Tar-Baphon's soul cage were a normal lich's Soul Cage (like a fancy box) there'd be no reason to underline its obscurity the way they did. They're not going to ever tell us all of the mysteries ("what happened to Aroden" is just never getting spoiled) but there's some things they need to explain eventually (like "why exactly was Galt so unstable" for example.)
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We have any ideas on non-combat mythic/"high level" stuff?
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It's just that if Tar-Baphon's soul cage were a normal lich's Soul Cage (like a fancy box) there'd be no reason to underline its obscurity the way they did. They're not going to ever tell us all of the mysteries ("what happened to Aroden" is just never getting spoiled) but there's some things they need to explain eventually (like "why exactly was Galt so unstable" for example.)
they did the latter already.
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I feel like the natural next "big threat" after TB though is "the algollthu are up to something."
I’m really hoping all the work done in Legends to establish an alghollthu conspiracy across the Golden Road is paid off with an AP someday. Shimon-Je won’t survive as a fugitive forever!
Dang. This thread is poppin'.
I love all the ideas. Because I am jonesing for a mythic book. And if we don't get one, I'm running my own homemade one. These are some good ones.
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We have any ideas on non-combat mythic/"high level" stuff?
This is a good point because another one of the problems that Wrath of the Righteous highlighted was that mythic monster statblocks can be so meaty as to be detrimental to the AP; there were plot points promised early in the AP that didn't get paid off on partly because so much of the finale's page count had to go to statblocks.
My first thought is crafting. When I think of mythic feats that are non-combative, I tend to think of acts of legendary craftsmanship. The forging of the Silmarils or the Rings of Power, or the Labyrinth or the wax wings that Daedalus invented on a much smaller scale.
There's a problem, we need a magic macguffin to stop the problem, but rather than going on a quest to find said macguffin, we need you to actually forge the artifact of legend purpose built to solve the problem.
That's a bit of an open ended thing though that a story will have a hard time accounting for what exactly the players are going to come up with.
You've also got things like, extraordinary feats of physical prowess beyond the capacity of mortals. Herakles holding up the sky as an extreme example, or the weeks long swimming race of Beowulf. Though a lot of that can be circumvented by already in play normal magical abilities without a contrived reason to not use them.
Edit: There's also my favorite 3.5 meme, "I am the Moon." "He is the Moon.", with the ultra high level deception rolls used to bluff people into thinking you're a god & manipulating them through that effort. Might be tricky to implement that beyond simple, high dc skill checks. Is an issue inherent with the system that a lot of the non-combat stuff just comes down to roleplaying.
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Yeah, skill challenges would definitely be one way. I for one really liked things like RoW's "World Engine" and the closing the worldwound thing. I could see expansions on those types of things be used.
Like, scavenge parts from across the multiverse to build a device that will change all the cosmos is a campaign in and of itself.
The statblock thing hurts since iirc WotR was infamous for having the much vaunted mythic monsters be squashed effortlessly.
Yeah the thing with "universal" systems (which PF tends toward) is that a lot of the rules are meant to facilitate "powers" and less "social". Of course, those systems usually have "social combat" and "social powers" but it's still something to note.
next obvious big bad after tar baphon either the 4 horsemen or the bound prince aka horsemen number 5 the dominion of the black or possibly yeeting groteus back to the boneyard
I mean most of those are viable but I don't know how obvious I'd call any of them. Especially the Oinodaemon - I legitimately had to look it up because I didn't remember/know that the "Bound Prince" was one of it's titles.
The Horsemen would be in an interesting shout in that, sure you could put any of them as the big bad for a duration of the setting but they also always struck me as the archfiends with the least personal interest in Golarion out of any of them. Like, outsider-demigods in general have this issue of, they're worshipped across an arbitrarily large number of worlds throughout the cosmos, while they have some interest in one or any of them, it tends to be unusual for them to focus on any one without there being a personal connection or just a bit of a whim.
But the Horsemen don't really have that in that their goal is the destruction of the entire universe. Golarion's just one more speck of dust for them to wipe out that they've no reason to take a particular interest in in the moment unless they decide to shift tactics to target Golarion specifically to release Rovagug & bring about the apocalypse that way, which, yeah, that'd do it, but also hasn't ever been a thing suggested that they're trying to do.
I doubt they'd put the big bad title on the Oinodaemon, though, for a couple reasons. One, the impression I've always had of the Oinodaemon is that it's an actual, full fledged god, on the same order as Asmodeus and Lamashtu. And while the point of, whatever limit you put on progression is always going to be somewhat arbitrary so why stop at X point, if we get to the point where we can kill the Oinodaemon, then there's gonna be the question of, why not stat up Asmodeus, or Lamashtu, or Gorum, or Iomedae so I can pay her back for the sonic damage I got for getting her trivia questions wrong that still have my ears ringing? Sorry, digressed there, but the point being I get the impression that the cut off is always going to be at demi-god level enemies rather than full god level enemies.
Especially the Oinodaemon because, it's too similar in so many respects to Rovagug, who's just a bigger & more iconic part of the setting & very much tied to Golarion specifically, so if they're going with that type of threat, I'd have to imagine they'd go with Rovagug.
I definitely think you can do a mythic ap around the Dominion of the Black but I don't think they'd be a good call for the overarching big bad of the setting because that would involve a pretty major genre shift. While I stand by what I've said about getting away from necromancer big bads as a necessary thing so it doesn't get repetitive, having an alien invasion be *the* threat the setting is collectively facing in the same way that the Gravelands is currently the collective threat, that would be pretty jarring, I think.
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I don't think it should be the main focus of the setting, and I definitely don't think such a story needs to be Mythic, but a Dominion of the Black invasion in, say, Numeria, is one of the stories I'd enjoy most in an AP.
Yeah I also don't know that it would *need* to be mythic, but I think it's one that you could make as mythic and it wouldn't be jarring. Like it's an option on the table.
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didn't happen for 1st edition, unfortunately, unlikely to happen for the 2nd.Obviously, Tar-Baphon needs to get smacked down, likely as the climactic end to the edition - which opens the door to other storylines!
I mean, Tar-Baphon wasn't even a thread on the board until the final Adventure Path of 1e; I figure you finish one edition by getting him out, let him be big and scary for an entire edition, the knock his head off as the glorious finale... until the next iteration of this thing, anyway.
Not that I'm in any rush :)
respectfully disagree.
1 - TB was the archenemy of Aroden, who is even in his absence, the central figure of the setting
2 - TB was the center of an entire AP - Carrion Crown - before he was the BBEG of the final AP of 1E
3 - 2 entire countries were basically written around him - Ustalav and Lastwall.
4 - are we supposed to have a third TB AP?
I think it was a poor decision not to finish him off at the end of 1E. Keeping him around doesn't advance anything... heck, in the LO World Guide, he's explicitly not doing anything. His lieutenants are diverse, powerful, and interesting, and they are still around. There's plenty of other threats, as the amazing diversity of 2E APs have made clear, for heroes to tangle with.
They kept TB in 2nd edition because they needed a threatening place of indisputable Evil complete with its BBEG after getting rid of the Worldwound.
For BBEG after the end of TB, I propose Razmir after he succeeds at the test of the Starstone.
An Evil nascent true ascended deity who might feel like spending some time on Golarion before heading to the Great Beyond sounds nicely threatening to me.
I remember someone pointing out to Jacobs once that after Ultimate Magic came out, if Razmir just got one more level he could pick up the Immortality arcane discovery & solve a lot of his own problems.
Jacobs responded that they made Razmir a level 19 wizard to avoid things like that & he's a level 19 for a reason. They can always change their mind but I suspect when Razmir gets dealt with, revealing him as a fraud is going to be the big take away from the adventure, rather than him actually achieving the godhood he claims to have.
I think I prefer Razmir as an ultimately pathetic failure who abused and killed countless people to finally die in some pitiful and unimpressive way. Consumed by his own ego and failings.
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I remember someone pointing out to Jacobs once that after Ultimate Magic came out, if Razmir just got one more level he could pick up the Immortality arcane discovery & solve a lot of his own problems.
The problem with this thinking is that NPCs don't "take" levels or archetypes or anything else. They're not playing a game.
I remember someone pointing out to Jacobs once that after Ultimate Magic came out, if Razmir just got one more level he could pick up the Immortality arcane discovery & solve a lot of his own problems.The problem with this thinking is that NPCs don't "take" levels or archetypes or anything else. They're not playing a game.
Yep, and some player build-choices aren't the PC's. Maybe in this instance yes, but Razmir strikes me as too risk averse to "earn XP". And if NPCs did have free will to earn XP (and knew its benefits), that'd change Golarion's dynamics at most every scale. Might resemble something like Farland's Runelords series.
It's hard to see Razimir as the next big bad because he's not even a top 3 Wizard in the setting. If you actually go ahead and have him pass the test of the Starstone, he's no more touchable than Norgorber so that's not happening.
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I remember someone pointing out to Jacobs once that after Ultimate Magic came out, if Razmir just got one more level he could pick up the Immortality arcane discovery & solve a lot of his own problems.The problem with this thinking is that NPCs don't "take" levels or archetypes or anything else. They're not playing a game.
As I recall, Jacobs expressed a similar thought in his own answer.
Personally I don't buy it so much, especially when the Kingmaker AP outright explained Irovetti's level being higher in War of the River Kings than in previous published material as "the player characters have leveled up, so could he". Even accepting that levels & classes are all a non-diegetic abstraction, presumably at some point in Razmir's fictional life there was a point where he could only cast the simplest of spells & progressed to the point that he could convincingly imitate a god. Him taking one more step is as possible as any given dm wants it to be.
But that's neither here nor there & I don't want to derail the thread so much. I'd like to see a Razmir ap at some point but I neither see him becoming the big bad of the setting nor ascending to a mythic level threat.
On that note I actually went back & looked up Inner Sea Magic to take a look at some of the names there & see if we have any candidates. Book predates the mythic system so it lists casters who would go on to be mythic characters as level 20+.
One name that jumped out to me, and the only one who hasn't been discussed here is Artokus Kirran, inventer of the sun orchid elixir, is listed as a level 20+ alchemist. Now, he's also not a villain, as it were, but that could lead one to think that a Thuvian AP might end up being a mythic affair. Could lead to a fight with Ahriman, who was statted out as a mythic threat in 1e, though as I recall he was significantly weaker than Tar-Baphon. I could have that wrong, though.
Side note, Inner Sea Combat, has pretty much no options to choose from, perhaps unsurprisingly. It lists *one* mythic fighter/champion(this book was released after mythic rules) who's long dead, one level 20 who's also long dead, and of the three highest level characters still alive at the publishing of the book - Grask Uldeth at lvl 17 and Kredak Bonefist & Sveinn Blood-Eagle both at lvl 18, Kerdak dying in Skull & Shackles has been made canon & Grask & Sveinn, aside from neither one being particularly villainous even if Grask was evil, both died in the transition to the new edition.
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Sveinn's alive (as far as we know) and has appeared a couple times in PF2. He features prominently in the scenario Path of Kings, and in Book of the Dead he's illustrated standing alone against a bunch of draugr on the edge of the Wyrmlake.
"Hearing the call of Valenhall" is a literal journey, not just a euphemism for death.
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This is opinion, not based on anything concrete, but I don't think Razmir could beat the Starstone. I think if he were in that scene in Neverending Story where he had to face himself, he'd run away screaming. I think everything he is & does is based on a lie. And that would carry over into any tests he took in the cathedral.
I also think he knows this. And it's why he hasn't attempted it.
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It's hard to see Razimir as the next big bad because he's not even a top 3 Wizard in the setting. If you actually go ahead and have him pass the test of the Starstone, he's no more touchable than Norgorber so that's not happening.
The test of the Starstone doesn't immediately make you a deity, so you could actually have a plot where he is in the process of ascension and the PCs are in a race against the clock to prevent the ascension from happening. If you wanted to have him be a BBEG across a whole edition, you could say that he didn't quite fully succeed at the test, and it's a multiple year process for him because of that.
It's hard to see Razimir as the next big bad because he's not even a top 3 Wizard in the setting. If you actually go ahead and have him pass the test of the Starstone, he's no more touchable than Norgorber so that's not happening.The test of the Starstone doesn't immediately make you a deity, so you could actually have a plot where he is in the process of ascension and the PCs are in a race against the clock to prevent the ascension from happening. If you wanted to have him be a BBEG across a whole edition, you could say that he didn't quite fully succeed at the test, and it's a multiple year process for him because of that.
There's been multiple contradictory sources of how the Starstone works over the years. James Jacobs has stated that to clear things up it is now definitive that if you pass the Test of The Starstone you become a full major Deity immediately.
Now that does raise questions. Like when Tar Baphon fought Aroden his defeat is treated as a major accomplishment for Aroden that he potentially could have lost, not lol, look at the idiot necromancer who tried to fight a God. What did Tar Baphon have is his back pocket that allowed him to go twelve rounds with a major deity? Is it the same thing that allowed him to curbstomp Arzani? Does it only work on Deities? Because if it worked on anything he should have been nigh-unstoppable. Does he still have it now?
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It's hard to see Razimir as the next big bad because he's not even a top 3 Wizard in the setting. If you actually go ahead and have him pass the test of the Starstone, he's no more touchable than Norgorber so that's not happening.The test of the Starstone doesn't immediately make you a deity, so you could actually have a plot where he is in the process of ascension and the PCs are in a race against the clock to prevent the ascension from happening. If you wanted to have him be a BBEG across a whole edition, you could say that he didn't quite fully succeed at the test, and it's a multiple year process for him because of that.There's been multiple contradictory sources of how the Starstone works over the years. James Jacobs has stated that to clear things up it is now definitive that if you pass the Test of The Starstone you become a full major Deity immediately.
Now that does raise questions. Like when Tar Baphon fought Aroden his defeat is treated as a major accomplishment for Aroden that he potentially could have lost, not lol, look at the idiot necromancer who tried to fight a God. What did Tar Baphon have is his back pocket that allowed him to go twelve rounds with a major deity? Is it the same thing that allowed him to curbstomp Arzani? Does it only work on Deities? Because if it worked on anything he should have been nigh-unstoppable. Does he still have it now?
Would you happen to have a link to that JJ post? I wasn't aware of there actually being a contradiction in sources - I thought we just had some sources that didn't go into how it worked and it felt like a pretty fast process, and then one that explained how it worked and explained it wasn't immediate. Either way, if there's contradictory sources they can always pick to make the one that tells the best story canon!
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This is opinion, not based on anything concrete, but I don't think Razmir could beat the Starstone. I think if he were in that scene in Neverending Story where he had to face himself, he'd run away screaming. I think everything he is & does is based on a lie. And that would carry over into any tests he took in the cathedral.
I also think he knows this. And it's why he hasn't attempted it.
Razmir is currently in Absalom bidding his time for when the time is right to take the Starstone test and succeed.
He did not do it before because the Sun Orchid Elixir was a much safer way to keep death at bay. But that path is no longer available.
Razmir is most definitely not a fool. He will go for it with the deck stacked in his favor as much as he can.
Considering his achievements, I honestly believe Razmir is currently one of the most dangerous mortals on Golarion.
I don't see him doing the Starstone tbh. If it kills him, it's kind of a cheap way out for one of the setting's more prominent and interesting villains... and if he wins he's a god and the things that make him an interesting character are mostly gone, because gods are largely untouchable.
Maybe a story where he takes the test, fails, but survives and there's fallout in terms of a negative impact on his legitimacy or accusations of the test being tampered with by outside forces or something along those lines.
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I don't see him doing the Starstone tbh. If it kills him, it's kind of a cheap way out for one of the setting's more prominent and interesting villains... and if he wins he's a god and the things that make him an interesting character are mostly gone, because gods are largely untouchable.
Maybe a story where he takes the test, fails, but survives and there's fallout in terms of a negative impact on his legitimacy or accusations of the test being tampered with by outside forces or something along those lines.
"What does God need with a Starstone?"
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I don't see him doing the Starstone tbh. If it kills him, it's kind of a cheap way out for one of the setting's more prominent and interesting villains... and if he wins he's a god and the things that make him an interesting character are mostly gone, because gods are largely untouchable.
Maybe a story where he takes the test, fails, but survives and there's fallout in terms of a negative impact on his legitimacy or accusations of the test being tampered with by outside forces or something along those lines.
he's better if he just keeps getting older and more desperate. that's the theme of the villain, and it works.
Yea. I definitely think he would stack the deck before he did anything. At least with sun orchid elixir, he can be quasi-not mortal.
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Yea. I definitely think he would stack the deck before he did anything. At least with sun orchid elixir, he can be quasi-not mortal.
Quasi-mortal's the guy in the belltower, right? :P
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Yea. I definitely think he would stack the deck before he did anything. At least with sun orchid elixir, he can be quasi-not mortal.
Indeed, but he could not get a dose at the most recent auction. Hence his current gambit of taking the Starstone test. Desperate times and everything.
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Yea. I definitely think he would stack the deck before he did anything. At least with sun orchid elixir, he can be quasi-not mortal.Indeed, but he could not get a dose at the most recent auction. Hence his current gambit of taking the Starstone test. Desperate times and everything.
Not to mention the archlich threatening most of Razmiran's western and southern borders, as well as the world at large. Sun orchid protects you from old age but not the ravages of undead hordes and continental devastation. The longer you live, the more you have to lose when a sapient apocalypse shows up next door.
Not to mention the archlich threatening most of Razmiran's western and southern borders, as well as the world at large. Sun orchid protects you from old age but not the ravages of undead hordes and continental devastation. The longer you live, the more you have to lose when a sapient apocalypse shows up next door.Yea. I definitely think he would stack the deck before he did anything. At least with sun orchid elixir, he can be quasi-not mortal.Indeed, but he could not get a dose at the most recent auction. Hence his current gambit of taking the Starstone test. Desperate times and everything.
Of course, he could always cut and run, leave the phony church and petty kingdom to die and live as a (very powerful and wealthy!) coward somewhere very far away - but what's interesting is that for all Razmir's profound selfishness, he doesn't seem to be doing that. If he's not cut down by some worthy heroes, then seeing what "showing up" looks like for him could be really interesting.
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Not to mention the archlich threatening most of Razmiran's western and southern borders, as well as the world at large. Sun orchid protects you from old age but not the ravages of undead hordes and continental devastation. The longer you live, the more you have to lose when a sapient apocalypse shows up next door.Yea. I definitely think he would stack the deck before he did anything. At least with sun orchid elixir, he can be quasi-not mortal.Indeed, but he could not get a dose at the most recent auction. Hence his current gambit of taking the Starstone test. Desperate times and everything.
Razmir might just end up getting so old that he transitions to lichdom naturally.
Just sort of pickles into undeath.
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They kept TB in 2nd edition because they needed a threatening place of indisputable Evil complete with its BBEG after getting rid of the Worldwound.
nah. TB didn't go down b/c people at Paizo wanted to keep him around for 'reasons'
It's why the
I don't think it is a good idea for the setting for some mysterious Heroes to be the ones to finally put an end to Tar Baphon. Maybe defeat him back to his phylactery, but finally put him down is homebrew material, not official cannon material. Baphon is so tied into the mythology of the setting that it is pretty much impossible to imagine the scenario where the people who defeat him do not become gods, or at least the stuff of absolute legend, and the problem with PCs as truly epic, legendary heroes is that the setting cannot reflect those heroes because they must remain completely faceless and largely unremarkable to the world.
Wrath of the Righteous has a bit of this problem too, but the Worldwound to most people on Golarion was just some place where a lot of demons were gathering to do nasty things. I imagine most people don't even think of demons as organized enough to actively plan something like the worldwound, so the full scope of the threat to most folks not intimately tied up with the crusades probably weren't aware of the major players involved. In the cannon, Deskari and Baphomet survive, they just probably have no more role to play in Golarion. Closing the Worldwound was a great mythic adventure because it feels cosmic in scope, but to most folks around Golarion the credit is probably largely going to Queen Galafrey and the crusades as a whole. That there are some incredibly powerful heroes that have completely disappeared from the world afterwards is probably mostly the stuff of legend and myth that most will dismiss. Tar Baphon might eventually be permanently defeated, but I feel like that would be something that PFS does as organization or is handled narratively between APs.
That is why I think that something with a piece of Rovagug escaping and leading the heroes on a planar adventure that returns to Golarion at the end is more probable for a possible mythic adventure. It won't really disrupt the setting of Golarion as long as most people never really learn about the heroes and their super powered adventures.
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I don't think it is a good idea for the setting for some mysterious Heroes to be the ones to finally put an end to Tar Baphon. Maybe defeat him back to his phylactery, but finally put him down is homebrew material, not official cannon material. Baphon is so tied into the mythology of the setting that it is pretty much impossible to imagine the scenario where the people who defeat him do not become gods, or at least the stuff of absolute legend, and the problem with PCs as truly epic, legendary heroes is that the setting cannot reflect those heroes because they must remain completely faceless and largely unremarkable to the world.
Wrath of the Righteous has a bit of this problem too, but the Worldwound to most people on Golarion was just some place where a lot of demons were gathering to do nasty things. I imagine most people don't even think of demons as organized enough to actively plan something like the worldwound, so the full scope of the threat to most folks not intimately tied up with the crusades probably weren't aware of the major players involved. In the cannon, Deskari and Baphomet survive, they just probably have no more role to play in Golarion. Closing the Worldwound was a great mythic adventure because it feels cosmic in scope, but to most folks around Golarion the credit is probably largely going to Queen Galafrey and the crusades as a whole. That there are some incredibly powerful heroes that have completely disappeared from the world afterwards is probably mostly the stuff of legend and myth that most will dismiss. Tar Baphon might eventually be permanently defeated, but I feel like that would be something that PFS does as organization or is handled narratively between APs.
your players, at your table, having their pcs SHOULD BE LEGENDS.
what they did for RETURN OF THE RUNELORDS is called the heroes of RISE and SHATTERED 'the Sihedron Heroes'... I thought that was an interesting way to integrate them into the fiction, but like... whatever. the PCs who overcome the BBEGs in any of the APs are legendary heroes... it's not like UNITY was any less of a threat to Golarion than TB.
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Exactly. At your table, the heroes should be legends. Going after setting redefining foes with years and years of written material about is a great homebrew campaign. The world fully becomes your own.
The Rune Lords were a big deal, but they were gone from the setting. Most people in Golarion right before Return of the Runelords wouldn’t recognize the names or symbols of them. Good APs set high stakes, but do it by having the PCs learn a bunch of new stuff about a threat that others are not taking seriously. Even the world wound was largely seen by most as an almost environmental threat to Golarion, not an organized, concerted effort. At the point there is one villain, and everyone has their eye on them, the threat level defies level 1 heroes rising up to be the ones to defeat it. APs let the hero’s rise to become Legends of their own stories, not the stories of others that they get to just step in and finish.
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Letting Tar Baphon just persist forever or having him get put down by random in-setting characters both sound profoundly unsatisfying. Hard disagree with Unicore, an AP is the only satisfying way to do this and it's okay for big APs to disrupt the status quo of the setting, as they've already done multiple times (almost every AP, even).
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It’s also worth saying: players already spent an entire AP focused on hitting back at Tar-Baphon, and there was a lot of discontent about that win over him not being a permanent one. People want “revenge” for Tyrant’s Grasp; giving that to an NPC would probably feel unsatisfying.
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Tyrant's Grasp was bold because it actually played through what is normally backstory material. "The great heroes sacrificed their lives for an incomplete win" is what players usually hear at a table when their purpose is to finish the job. This time, it's the prologue. I understand why it's not to everyone's tastes, especially because the PCs in that story are canonically DEAD in ways that usually don't/can't happen in TTRPGs, but I love it. I certainly wouldn't want it for every story, yet for that story it worked perfectly. Closing out an edition on that note? Brilliant.
Tl;dr: it was the Rogue One to the inevitable A New Hope, only it came out first.
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Yeah, I played through Tyrant's Grasp and the PCs didn't approach anywhere near the power level where I would buy that these are people who could permanently end a Mythic Lich, let alone the Mythic Lich who was Aroden's greatest enemy.
They were, in the tradition of survival horror, resourceful and gritty and punched above their weight due to that and some plot contrivances, but honestly the WotR party are people who should struggle to end Tar Baphon for good and those are people who hunted down and permakilled two demon lords for fun.
The point of Tyrant's Grasp was to set up the "looming unreasonable terror up north" since they were canonizing "there's no Worldwound anymore."
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Clearly some people really want the kill Tar Baphon AP, so if there is enough clamoring for it, maybe they let it happen at the end of PF2, but I personally think it is an unsatisfying end to Tar Baphon, especially when it is far more interesting to see him continue to be a mover and shaker and involved in the kinds of interwoven plots that he is tied into in the Legends book. That is a much better use of Tar Baphon for the time being in my opinion. I think things like finding his Phylactery sound like more interesting APs to me than finishing him off. He is just too powerful to for lower level heroes to really be doing anything to fight him, but there are big things that still need to happen for him to be defeatable, and those things feel like high level play things more than mid level set up things.
I guess I can see the advantage of optional mythic rules existing for folks who want to homebrew fight the mythical tier foes of the setting, but that really gets back to just looking for level 20+ content more than adding a new source of mythical power source to the setting again. Players getting access to the same source of mythic power as Tar Baphon would involve things like tricking gods into killing you and require thousands of years to set up. Wrath of the Righteous introduced a new power source but all of it had to be contained to that AP or else Mythic demons was just going to have to be the new normal thing of the Golarion setting.
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That just sounds really boring to me, he's already overstayed his welcome. I'm not sure dragging it out even more will benefit the setting and continuing to give him endless plot armor just doesn't feel really satisfying for anyone.
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Actually: An adventure path where the PCs are Vikings and become Linnorm Kings uncovering a traitor who would sell out the Linnorm Kingdoms to the Winter Witches resulting in a civil war that shakes up the place.
The reason this needs to be Mythic is because PCs really need to punch above their weight to take out a Linnorm mid-campaign.
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I'm also going to voice my disagreement with Unicore on this topic; the more a TTRPG setting becomes about the established characters in the setting, the less I like it. I already feel there's too much of Pathfinder that is, the story being told to us by the developers. I don't also need that story to be about how their characters did the awesome things.
In my view, the ideal state of a TTRPG setting is that the developers give us the tools with which to tell our own stories. We can't have exactly that in Pathfinder, the time for that is long past. But, I do feel that the player characters should get to be the heroes and do the heroic things and be the main characters at their tables.
Having said all that, I don't need this to happen tomorrow. Doesn't need to be the next AP. Him remaining as a big mover/shaker in the setting is fine.
But he also can't be around forever because at a certain point he needs to go on the offensive and a side effect of him being so absurdly powerful is that there's very little else in the setting that can check him. Shorshen & Baba Yaga, sure, but outside of those two or a new party of mythic heroes, eventually the question of "why hasn't he just conquered X yet" is going to start coming up.
I think my point is being missed. You absolutely should tell the story of defeating the whispering Tyrant if that is what you want to do. Maybe we will even get some stats and settlements and additional monsters to make it easier for you to tell that story.
But I think making it into an AP is going to be highly disappointing and unsatisfactory for the setting. It is going to end up a heavy handed railroad of an AP that has to dance around how it has you interact with all the other legendary Goliarion people you are going to interact with pursuing the end of the Tyrant. He has a host of enemies all of which will be clamoring to get in on the action.
As a homebrew, this is great! The whole world can shift and reshape based upon the build of your party and who it makes sense for them to work with. For an AP, there isn’t the page space to keep this open ended. It is going to be one organization or nation or small set of organization, but every option added is a step away from getting deeper into the adventure.
There is only so much book space. Look at how APs are generally designed. The social/organization building you do around the railroaded set piece encounters are always figures new to the setting or feature one big name, but an incredibly localized big wig where the default consequences of that interaction end up having a narrow impact on the setting because the setting is bigger than the APs. Even in wrath of the righteous, Baphomet and Deskari are enemies who have been around a long time, and mentioned in lore, but not really engaged with until this AP. Players need Villains who get built up over the AP. I don’t think it is impossible to do, but I think that it has a high chance of being very disappointing.