In a world with alignment “evil” was a pretty codified concept. Now, Golarion has shifted to a place where evil is a much more subjective concept as there are not really purity tests for separating evil actions, intentions or innate states of being from good or just neutral ones.
Should her anathema change to focus on unholy?
Does her church have doctrines to try to define evil specifically for what must be struck down vs what can be redeemed?
It feels like the removal of alignment has a good chance of leaving the church of the Dawnflower in a place where subjective interpretations of morality are going to lead to a lot of violence. I know we are not supposed to see a major change in how the world works from PF2 to PF2 remastered, but this is an area where it feels like an in-world measuring stick has been removed and now every disciple of Sarenrae is now on their own.
What is “actually evil” though?
Either the faith has to have very specific texts spelling that out for followers, with a lot of confirmed divinely certified decrees of what does and doesn’t qualify or you probably end up with some nasty inter-faith fractioning and fighting. It is just a wildly subjective anathema in a world where objective evil doesn’t exist compared to one where it does. Unholy really fits the bill much more cleanly post remaster.
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It's much more tenable than pre-remaster. Before, with a Redeemer of Pharasma you were commiting an Anathema every time you were missing a Strike against an evil creature. You were roughly limited to first attacks and it was siphoning all your Hero Points.
No, really, remaster made it playable.
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It's much more tenable than pre-remaster. Before, with a Redeemer of Pharasma you were commiting an Anathema every time you were missing a Strike against an evil creature.
The phrasing "Fail to strike down Evil" is a bit of an idiom. A more literal representation of the concept would be "Refuse to attempt to end Evil".
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The phrasing "Fail to strike down Evil" is a bit of an idiom. A more literal representation of the concept would be "Refuse to attempt to end Evil".
I should have added the sarcasm trait to my post :)
Actually, it would be great to add traits to posts so you could convey your tone.
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As for the change from Evil to evil and the question of what counts as evil now that alignment is gone - that is something that can't be codified into the game rules.
I wouldn't recommend replacing that with the mechanic of Unholy. There are plenty of evil things that aren't Sanctified Unholy. There may even be individuals who are inherently Unholy but are not evil - such as PC Undead.
Actually, it would be great to add traits to posts so you could convey your tone.
Isn't that the entire reason that Aliases exist?
As for the change from Evil to evil and the question of what counts as evil now that alignment is gone - that is something that can't be codified into the game rules.
I wouldn't recommend replacing that with the mechanic of Unholy. There are plenty of evil things that aren't Sanctified Unholy. There may even be individuals who are inherently Unholy but are not evil - such as PC Undead.
I guess for me, having Sarenrites have to strike down all lower-case evil, is that that is a horribly difficult and subjective edict/anathema to follow. I think the purpose is much more intentionally pointed at cosmic/big E Evils in the world/planes, which is exactly what unholy is supposed to point to. Trying to decide whether theft is evil vs murder or other subjective ethical (i.e. old alignment thread) discussions, with "strike down" as the only permitted response is a pretty rough place for a god as popular as Sarenrae.
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I think that is for every Sarenrite to decide for themselves.
Taking the PFS rules as semi-official guidelines for GM RAI:
Remember that edicts and anathema exist to create roleplaying opportunities at the table for your character, and should not be used by the GM to pressure PCs, or by PCs to pressure other members of the table toward specific styles of play.
Edit: Link doesn't work very well. Search for 'edicts'.
Yeah, I get that on an individual character level and agree for general play, but when talking about world building and nations dedicated to Sarenrae, I think that gets really messy, really fast if it is "everyone define evil for yourself...and destroy it."
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I reaaaaally don't think Saranrae expected you to strike down everyone with evil alignment before the remaster, otherwise you'd just go around mowing down peasants with divine lance. You can't be the god of redemption and also the god of murder everyone evil on sight. There was always a subjective tight rope to walk for her clerics.
One suggestion I have for finding "redeemable" bad guys is using the Glimpse of Redemption ability. As a GM, I don't make a tactical choice between whether the enemy hesitates and doesn't harm your ally, vs complete the attack and suffer the consequences. I make the decision based on the creature's nature. A demon or most undead will always go for blood, but so will lots of evil dragons, humans, and other creatures of pure malice. But if the NPC hesitates and stays there hand, that signifies there is something redeemable there, and players know they should offer a chance to surrender.
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Evil still exists, it's just not a metaphysical entity you can detect with magic. The current version is probably more workable because if you encounter an evil person who is buying fruit at the market, you are not obligated to just murder them in the town square because your evil detector pinged.
Now it just works like: If you become aware of an evil person or an evil scheme you should stop them or it.
Effects with the unholy trait are tied to powerful magical forces of cruelty and sin. They often have stronger effects on holy creatures. Creatures with this trait are strongly devoted to unholy causes, and often have weakness to holy. If a creature with weakness to unholy uses an unholy item or effect, it takes damage from its weakness.
This is a much stronger basis for "must be struck down" than any game mechanical definition of evil that has ever existed, even pre-remaster.
A creature that is unholy but actively trying to repent and lose the unholy trait might be a good exception for mercy, but the trait is "strongly devoted to unholy causes," that is not going to include "I got turned into a vampire and am trying everything I can not to succumb to the evil impulses this condition drives me towards."
Without alignment, I think the current anathema "fail to strike down evil" creates far more opportunities for the cult of the Dawnflower to exist than making that more clearly a drive to strike down forces that are "inherently tied to powerful, magical forces of cruelty and sin" and the whole strong devotion to unholy causes.
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I think the OP is overestimating how easy it was to identify objective evil pre-remaster. While 'Evil' was a quantifiable force, there weren't always easily available tools for managing it.
So for the most part nothing is really all that different.
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I think the OP is overestimating how easy it was to identify objective evil pre-remaster. While 'Evil' was a quantifiable force, there weren't always easily available tools for managing it.
So for the most part nothing is really all that different.
Wanted to say much the same. I don't think the majority of Sarenites will even have noticed the difference. Evil may no longer be objective, but even of every Sarenite picked up the uncommon Detect Alignment spell, it still doesn't detect the majority of people they're going to see.unless the Sarenite is of "heroic" status (level 6-10), they can't even hope to fight anything that pings as evil unless it's obviously a low level demon.
I don't think Sarenrae's anathema was ever "kill any creature that pings on Detect Evil unless it repents", to me it always had an interpretive component. Mass murder? Yeah that's probably evil, go stop that. It's important to remember, having people determine what is evil and in need of striking down isn't a free-for-all. Even if the church's teachings are variable enough across different nations about what is and isn't evil, she can always remind her blessing or send curses to those who get funny ideas about smiting puppies or something
I think I must have misrepresented the issue.
I don’t think Sarenrae has ever really cared about having her followers try to stomp out lower case evil. Her concern was always capital E-Evil. Of course her followers didn’t go around trying to detect every minor source of evil in the world. They were concerned with stopping the kind of Evil plots now associated with the unholy tag…the irredeemable, magically tied to the source of sin and destruction type Evil. That is why unholy makes way more sense to me for her Anathema than leaving it the word “evil” which no longer has any shared, unified definition or concept in Golarion outside of “unholy.”
I think we can all agree unholy would be much easier to parse. I wouldn't hate if they errata'ed that change into place. There might still be grey areas, like demon worshippers who don't actually sanctify and gain the trait, but that still feels cleaner than "strike down evil" felt either pre or post remaster.
What is “actually evil” though?
... It is just a wildly subjective anathema...
Typically religious people don't have any problem defining evil. Their religion does it for them. It is just a particular flavour of non religious people that have that philosophical issue.
Anyway this is a Sarenrae anathema. So the relevant definition of evil is what the Sarenrite religion thinks it is.
Um maybe that is still not clear in practice to us, but the answer will be to research the available information on Sarenrae and work it out.
Um maybe that is still not clear in practice to us, but the answer will be to research the available information on Sarenrae and work it out.
Or, even better... have the Golarian Lore team do that once and update the Edicts/Anathema to better define it instead of using "strike down evil".
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Alternatively, I don't think Sarenrae is marked 'safe' yet...
I don’t think Sarenrae has ever really cared about having her followers try to stomp out lower case evil. Her concern was always capital E-Evil.
I think that's a distinction players have worked a lot harder to define than the game and its designers ever did.
I don’t know I think James Jacobs has invested a lot of time and energy into define how Sarenrae expects her followers to act, hence the whole effort to have to errata the cult of the dawn flower, because the idea her worshipers could define for themselves what evil had to be ruthlessly struck down resulted in exactly the kind of problematic behavior that I think we are talking about here.
I agree that it is possible a end to Sarenrae might be as likely as an errata to her anathema, but I think, if she isn’t going to die, the new divine book coming out might be a good place to define her anathema more clearly and possibly even errata it.
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Maybe I am under-thinking things for a change. To my mind, the problem with the Cult of the Dawnflower (racist undertones notwithstanding) isn't that they were a sect who decided for themselves what was evil, it's that the (non-canon, errata'd) lore at the time gave them Sarenrae's support to define their military targets as evil. To put it another way, it's not that they defined their own evil, it's that they were wrong.
The thing is, I do think that Sarenrae bids you to strike down all forms of evil. I don't know of any lore that shows her anathema only applies to demons and cultists (i.e. things encompassed by the unholy trait) and not more general evil. The description of Sarenrae I know explicitly calls out the cruelties born in the hearts of mortals, and even in her latest description, her followers, "oppose evil everywhere with words first, and when necessary, with scimitar and flame."
Is evil horribly subjective? Any alignment debate thread shows this is absolutely true. Does this strike me as a problem for Sarenrae's worshippers? I still can't really see how. If a follower isn't certain they oppose evil, they pray for guidance and they investigate the matter further. If the situation is urgent, they make a judgement call which, if they've had any education in their faith, will not be the first moral dilemma they've been exposed to. If they absolutely have to stop something that they can't know is evil, they don't go for the righteous fireball of justice on round one, they try to subdue to their foe.
And if they start taking it into their heads to start a Dawnflower Cult 2.0 because there's no mechanical definition of evil anymore? They lose Sarenrae powers, because it doesn't matter if there's no mechanical definition of evil, Sarenrae is the goddess of healing and redemption, not smiting first ask questions later, nor of military conquest. Every follower of hers may be called upon to figure out for themselves where the line of irredeemable evil lies, but no follower gets to be judge and executioner at their own whim.
On a meta level, the tension between knowing you have a duty to stop evil (using word before murds) and knowing that there's no way to always know where to draw that line is one of the most compelling things to me about Sarenrae, especially coupled with her clear preference for rehabilitative justice and healing.
Evil still exists, it's just not a metaphysical entity you can detect with magic. The current version is probably more workable because if you encounter an evil person who is buying fruit at the market, you are not obligated to just murder them in the town square because your evil detector pinged.
Now it just works like: If you become aware of an evil person or an evil scheme you should stop them or it.
Further caveat, if it is even feasible for you to do so. Or perhaps if not you should attempt to engage others who are capable.
Just because the first level champion is aware the 20th level evil necromancer is just on the other side of a wall, doesn't mean they should suicidally charge in and try to take them on.
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I don’t know I think James Jacobs has invested a lot of time and energy into define how Sarenrae expects her followers to act
Yeah, but probably not as much time trying to subdivide the word 'evil' into multiple words with entirely different meanings. Again that largely seems to be a distinction created by players on social media websites. The statement I quoted about evil and Evil doesn't even make sense unless you're knee deep in D&D alignment chart brainrot.
The problem with interpreting it that way, or changing it to Unholy, is it fundamentally redefines the tenant to be about opposing a specific sort of creature, rather than fighting against evil itself.
Rewriting the text to reference Unholy targets means that our hypothetical follower is duty bound to oppose an Unholy cleric of Abadar, who may not actually be doing anything bad at all, but not a mundane serial killer. That totally redefines the text and, imo, is a little bit silly.
I had more I wanted to elaborate on re:Sarenrae herself, but Sibelius Eos Owm basically says it all perfectly.
You are not an unholy sanctified cleric of Abadar and doing nothing bad at all. Holy and unholy are more than just mechanical traits.
And it’s not that I think Sarenrites don’t try to stop what they perceive as evil in the world, it is wether they really need an anathema against failing to strike down every evil they encounter, or whether the intention there is more geared towards supernatural, almost certainly irredeemable threats?
Would it be fair to say, then, that your core concern is more to do with whether the smiting of (all) evil needs to be elevated to the top-level of an anathema, when deities like Pharasma leave the destruction of undead as a mere edict (and not, 'fail to destroy the undead'). After all, even when we agree that Sarenrae wants you to smite any kind of evil, by making it a matter of anathema we ensure that her followers technically risk their divine connection any time they don't strike when they walk down the street and see one of the dozens of 'small' evils in an average city street. Lawfully-minded Sarenites compelled to chase pickpockets through alleys while Chaotically-minded Sarenites show up at your landlord's doorstep, encouraging them to reconsider their latest rent hike.
And I suppose it's fair to ask, does striking down all evil need to be a top-level decree? Or should that level of vigilance be reserved only for the supernatural evil, while the mundane and banal evils are merely an edict or a matter for general doctrine? I'll admit, this anathema (particularly the wording) was one that came up a couple times in the Edict/Anathema Incompatibility Thread a while back.
Even so, outside of the 'fail to...' phrasing, I don't really have trouble with this anathema compelling vigilance against both mortal and supernatural evils alike. This of course is because any situation I can imagine coming up where I might ask "do I really have to smite a person for tax evasion?" I can always answer by saying "I don't think that's the kind of evil Sarenrae is talking about". If I didn't have that luxury (say, perhaps, if I played at Society games) I could see being a little more worried about what other GMs interpret as a failure to strike down evil, but that's not a problem that's new as of the Remaster so at worst it's not something I consider newly untenable--as someone suggested upstream, dropping evil as a mechanical term doesn't introduce any problems with character understanding of evil that didn't exist before, just the stakes riding on the interpretation.
In any case, talking about appropriateness--how I read this anathema is kind of a response to the idea that evil flourishes when good does nothing. This is Sarenrae "the Good God"'s way of saying, "Don't be the person who does nothing. Goodness is a garden that's actively maintained." It strikes me as appropriate for her general vibe, especially with the reminder that she's also not a war goddess, and imho strike down doesn't mean kill out of hand.
Have your Sarenrae-worshipping character decide if he's High Church and going to smite everything shady or Low Church and tolerant of anything not Unholy.
It is vague, and should be resolved table by table.