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So since everyone keeps believing that Xanderghul has survived due to cheeky hints about it, let's make guesses about how that might be possible considering at first it seemed like his canon fate was super perma mega death. But I believe we can make guesses on this based on hints in Return of the Runelord.
We know that in Returns, Alaznist ganks him with time travel shenanigans and thus his mythic powers have been stolen by her and he is resurrected by his contingencies in weakned form composed of Shadowstuff essentially making him living illusion until he can recover his power. Assumption for adventure is that if pcs stop his shrines resurrecting him, the players can kill him for real or humiliate him and make him surrender, canon here seems to be fight to death.
Upon death, this is described to happen:
If he’s dead when the rod is removed, a distant sound of the runelord’s scream of agony and despair echoes through the chamber, and the entire temple of the Peacock Spirit seems to shudder as its god’s soul finally moves on to face judgment in the Boneyard. As he dies, his remains transform into a creature of resplendence—the Peacock Spirit itself—and then this too vanishes from the world. With the death of its god, the cult of the Peacock Spirit is no more.
Then later on when players need to recover Karzoug's soul and find his soul has been stolen by daemons from river of soul, they find Karzoug's soul being used on weight to find souls more sinful than him to be sacrificed to Black Sun in abaddon. When players arrive, Xanderghul's soul is being compared with Karzoug and if players don't interrupt the "cutscene", Xanderghul's soul is sacrificed to Black Sun which you think would destroy his soul completely. Assuming players don't rescue his soul so that Pharasma can properly judge it, it would be bit surprising if that was the canon though because its treated as "if players do something we didn't expect them to do, Pharasma approves"
So we are back to question of "how the hell he survived his soul being sacrificed to Bound Prince? He seems to be super mega ultra dead." and I think there are several things that hint at possibility of it DESPITE his soul seemingly being destroyed.
1) His death scene describes his soul moving to Boneyard while his body composed of quasi real shadowstuff transforming into Peacock Spirit and vanishing. While that could be really cool death animation, it does kinda imply something is happening to his body while his soul moves on.
2) His stolen mythic power was supposed to return to him when Alaznist died, so where DID it go?
So as result here is bunch of my crazy theories on what might have happened
a) he split into multiple entities upon his death and only his human soul went to be judged.(his mythic power might have returned to second entity or became its own one as well)
b) being sacrificed to black sun doesn't actually destroy the soul
c) he fooled everyone and the soul that went to be judged was also extremely realistic illusion (aka, something something multiple contingency plans)
d) canon is that he actually got his souls saved and post judgement he retained his memories and ascended
e) Alaznist's time paradoxes caused shenanigans to happen
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Actually just of the top of my head it occures to me the plan was feed his soul to the bound prince to awaken him but whats to say the opposite couldent have happend (Ie Xanderghul turns it around somehow and feeds off the bound princes power in a similair manner that the horsemen do). Or perhaps rather than being consumed the two fused into a single hybrid being
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Easy: In the end, basically nothing that happened in that AP actually happened as you end up undoing all the time-traveling shenanigans that kicked everything off in the first place.
While the PCs might remember killing 'X', that presumably never actually happened in the 'corrected' timeline created by the AP's resolution...
Seriously, don't try to make sense of time travel: You'll just end up with no reasonable answers and a massive headache...
ADDENDUM:
Adding the mandatory quote:People assume that time is a strict progression from cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.
It's all just wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff...
Looking at the remaster version of the wish ritual...
A crit success of that can do something.
There are still plans, but they're slower motion now than they were after some behind the scenes developments. Stay tuned, but be more patient than you thought you had to be as far as this particular storyline being revealed, I guess.
Sounds like a new Varisia AP may be in the offering sometime in the future. :)
(Yes, I'm aware of the Sandpoint anniversary adventure, I don't think that it will be related to Xan-Xan).
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There are still plans, but they're slower motion now than they were after some behind the scenes developments. Stay tuned, but be more patient than you thought you had to be as far as this particular storyline being revealed, I guess.
Tbh, I just love speculating well in advance before any reveals happen xD Like I figured out we wouldn't hear about this for a year at least
So since everyone keeps believing that Xanderghul has survived due to cheeky hints about it,...
Wait what? Has Paizo ever announced the hints you mentioned? I've never even heard it. When? Where? I'm so curious.
By the way, I have always believed Xanderghul died in Return of the Runelords for good. I thought the developers (perhaps James Jacobs?) decided to remove Xanderghul from the picture entirely because they regarded having Xanderghul survive would seriously hinder Sorshen's plan to redeem Thassilon (since Xanderghul is much more powerful than Sorshen and he is still evil, surely he would have posed a great obstacle to her plan to rebuild Thassilon as she sees fit). Which frustrated me a lot, because I think having more runelords return would make the story more interesting (I personally think having Xanderghul and Krune return as well would be a great idea).
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Wait what? Has Paizo ever announced the hints you mentioned? I've never even heard it. When? Where? I'm so curious.
Not directly but the ending of stolen fate hints at it plus the fact there using him on the cover of one of there new books seems to hint at it.
Edit also James has confirmed in this thread there are plans so there is certainly something going on.
And now we know how Xanderghul returns.
Creative Director
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I thought the developers (perhaps James Jacobs?) decided to remove Xanderghul from the picture entirely because they regarded having Xanderghul survive would seriously hinder Sorshen's plan to redeem Thassilon (since Xanderghul is much more powerful than Sorshen and he is still evil, surely he would have posed a great obstacle to her plan to rebuild Thassilon as she sees fit). Which frustrated me a lot, because I think having more runelords return would make the story more interesting (I personally think having Xanderghul and Krune return as well would be a great idea).
A little late to the discussion, but no.
After Wrath of the Righteous, I wasn't really interested in doing another mythic adventure anytime soon. But also, Alaznist, as the most powerful Runelord who WASN'T at a tier that required mythic PCs, was the best choice for Return's villain. Which meant she needed to take out Xanderghul early. And since I wanted there to be lots of runelords to face in this one, Xanderghul escaped death via the way he did here to face the PCs as a depowered (but still powerful) version of himself.
After Return, some folks were pretty vocal in their disappointment that they never got to see Xanderghul at full power, and so that bit of feedback remained in my brain for years. When we moved forward with Godsrain, a way to bring back Xanderghul and give him back his mythic power presented itself in a way that I felt was not only pretty wild and delightful but also in a way that helped to bolster the sheer mayhem in all the ways a god's death can undo reality and remake it into something else.
But I still couldn't go forward with that story until we either decided to do mythic for 2E or not—had we not, I would have gone a different route with the story since in that reality, NO creatures in the game would be mythic and that would have been a pretty big power-level retcon. I'm glad we did eventually do mythic rules, as a result, but it took a while to get there, and we learned from Wrath of the Righteous to not do the mythic Adventure Paths day and date with those rules—we needed time for the developers to be more comfortable with those rules and to incorporate feedback from customers about how they worked in game.
It was never really about "we need to give Sorshen room" at that point.
As the only other runelord that was so mythic and powerful that the PCs can't face her without being mythic themselves, Sorshen had the same problems as Xanderghul—if her role was to be fought, then that adventure required PCs to be mythic.
I didn't want to off-screen "remove" both of those two, so I chose to have Xanderghul get the humiliating defeat (which, narratively, was more satisfying for someone associated with pride and arrogance), and then had Sorshen turn over her new leaf after spending 10,000 years or so coming to terms with her history and mistakes and watching as the other six runelords did NOT and one after the other got put down. Hence her decision to not emerge with plans of world domination but instead with plans of integrating into the new world in a less destructive and more cooperative manner. This wasn't meant to ignore the many cruelties and evils she wreaked upon the world in the past, but was meant to show that people can change, if we give them time and the opportunity. But ALSO to dodge the simple fact that fighting her wasn't an option.
If the concept of mythic HAD never re-emerged into 2e, what was the plan to 'power-scale' the formerly mythic NPCs? Just make levels beyond the normal limit perhaps?
On that note, Revenge looks amazing overall. Got my second book in recently and I cannot wait for a chance to run it.
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Creative Director
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If the concept of mythic HAD never re-emerged into 2e, what was the plan to 'power-scale' the formerly mythic NPCs? Just make levels beyond the normal limit perhaps?
On that note, Revenge looks amazing overall. Got my second book in recently and I cannot wait for a chance to run it.
If the concept of mythic had never emerged, we would have just put those previously mythic NPCs and creatures in the level 21–25 range. Probably skewed toward 24 or 25. Which would have felt weird from an in-world perspective, having Treerazer be "as powerful" as Cyth-V'sug, for example. But compressing what was previously CR 25 to CR 30 down to all be level 25 would have worked in a game where level 20 non-mythic would be the standard. Weird and confusing for a while to those who knew the previous game's rules and lore, but not impossible to do.
The tricky part was instead coming to that decision—whether to do mythic or not. Because as long as we were in a "We don't know when or if we'll do this, or if we never will" mode for the first several years of 2E's release schedule, we simply had to hold stories like "Fight Xanderghul" off in the "do it later and maybe never" category. And even after we decided to do mythic... it was still a few years until we could responsibly take a shot at that story.
Side note: Originally, the plan was to have the mythic rules out quite a bit earlier, with Revenge of the Runelords potentially coming out within a year of Seven Dooms for Sandpoint, but then the OGL thing happened and the remastering had to take place and everything got pushed back a year or two. Yet another lesson to me to never trust the stability of the future when making long-term story plans, I guess! :)
Anyway! We never really started to think about how to re-scale the power for the 1E mythic creatures/NPCs, because work on that topic was irresponsible and a waste of time to start before we'd made a choice to never do mythic rules. Until then, we were MOSTLY assuming it would follow the scaling of 1E, with mythic threats being in the level 26–30 range (to correspond to the CR scale, to which we'd stuck pretty close to when converting monsters from a CR scale to a level scale between 1st and 2nd edition). That's why you saw a few artifacts and mentions of creatures being above level 25 in earlier OGL products... that was our best effort at "future proofing."
Turns out that level 25 is the max in Pathfinder, so those above level 25 mentions get errata now when we go back to them.
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Creative Director
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Just never include them as antagonists. Then you don't need stats.
That was for sure an option (treating those one-time level 26–30 foes in the same way we've always treated full-fledged deities), and probably the best one from a rules side, but a gross and undesirable and frustrating one from the narrative side, since we HAD included them as antagonists in 1st edition.
A big part of the decision to finally do mythic did come from the desire to not invalidate those types of stories, because invalidating a type of story between editions is frustrating to those who enjoy those stories.
It's not something an RPG game publisher can always do perfectly between editions, but it's something we strove for, or at least to minimize.