I just had a thought. What kind of force prevented Aroden’s return? Is that a story arch for a future AP?
Maybe a mythic campaign to follow after the path Aroden took before being killed or severed from godhood or entering a portal into a magic devoid world called earth and ending up working at a fastfood chain to get by?
Ok maybe not the last one.
It could be an interesting mythic campaign to learn where Aroden went and to follow after to find out what happened. But perhaps that would be the last campaign before the next edition change.
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I've always been of the opinion that Aroden committed some kind of prophecy-shattering divine suicide.
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"How did Aroden die?" has been a central mystery for the Golarion setting even before PF1.
From what has been said, Paizo will not reveal the details (unless/until the entire setting gets retired).
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I've always been of the opinion that Aroden committed some kind of prophecy-shattering divine suicide.
Like there's a "Aroden understood that something horrific was fated to happen, and in sacrificing himself he empowered heroes to throw off the shackles of fate and hopefully prevent this tragedy" is something that metatextually makes sense (i.e. the reasons the omens are lost is because PCs have agency.) But I also get why they wouldn't want to confirm this.
I always understood it as that Tar-Baphon used a sticky death effect on him and Aroden, who I personally admittedly conceptually dont really like, drew the short stick when the two were throwing down :P
There are other divine cases of resurrection. This is a setting where Osiris is canon, clearly dying doesn't mean you can't be a god, or that you can't come back. With the power of Wish available, you don't even need a body. What killed Aroden is an old question, with plenty of answers. But I'm suddenly intrigued by the question, why hasn't he been brought back? Is Pharasma refusing to release the soul from whatever judgement she has passed...or is Aroden simply not available, an invalid target for such a spell? After all, you can't resurrect someone if they're not actually dead.
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Gods are presumably as well as being a lot harder to kill also a lot harder to resurrect. Presumably, if something is capable of killing a god in the first place, it'd also be capable of making the vast vast majority of ways to resurrect them also impossible. Outside Osiris who has... very limited lore in PF, I can only really think of Tsukiyo as an example of a god which has actually died and then came back to life (Stuff like Nurgal/Nergal doesn't count, that's just the killing not doing the full job); inversely there a lots of examples of gods being killed, including a whole bunch new ones this year.
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I've always been of the opinion that Aroden committed some kind of prophecy-shattering divine suicide.Like there's a "Aroden understood that something horrific was fated to happen, and in sacrificing himself he empowered heroes to throw off the shackles of fate and hopefully prevent this tragedy" is something that metatextually makes sense (i.e. the reasons the omens are lost is because PCs have agency.) But I also get why they wouldn't want to confirm this.
Even though it’s very meta, I like this answer the best.
Well, that one and the bath tub answer.
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There are three theories about Aroden that I like.
1.) Aroden was prophesied to return to Cheliax leading it to a glorious age, but after asking Pharasma about it he realised that the prophecy is double-edged and would have catastrophic consequences. Unwilling to let them come to pass, he did the least problematic thing he ever did, and allowed himself to die to avert that prophesy. Given the involvement of Hell in Cheliax after his death, I like to think his vanity would have led him to try wresting Hell from Asmodeus himself, who wouldn't let himself die without unleashing Rovagug as one final, spiteful act. But breaking a prophecy so impactful had the unintended consequence of shattering prophesy entirely across the multiverse, and what Pharasma had enabled - for she of all gods hypocritically fears her own death - has unintentionally cast them adrift in a rolling sea of fate. When the future was fixed, she at least knew when and how her end was coming. Now she's as bereft of foresight as mortals are, constantly looking over her shoulder for some assassin she didn't previously fear. Her reluctance to tell Iomedae about his fate, and refusal to release his soul after it passed, doesn't stem from some secret purpose, but only out of her own fear and shame for selfishly prolonging her own potential life at the expense of Destiny and a guarantee that there even will be a next universe.
Yes, I also had a personal preference for which god was going to die in the War of Immortals event, what about it?
2.) Aroden didn't die at all. He simply gave up being a god, the same way Nex left his nation and the war he was fighting behind. He's still alive somewhere in the cosmos, maybe in a new body and a fake name, perhaps even fulfilling the prophecy and actually being reincarnated in Cheliax, but as a mortal, being parted from his divinity with a catastrophic boom that created the Echo of Lost Divinity because when has Aroden truly understood or cared about the consequences of his actions? He might not even remember being Aroden. There was a Skyrim fanfiction that suggested that the PC is actually Talos returned to the world, explaining why he seems to be absent from the pantheon where other gods are more active, and it would be appropriate for the God of Humanity to have reached what he considered a 100% Completion run on being a wizard-god, and simply wanted to start again from the ground up. His resurrection is thus prevented simply because his soul is no longer available in the afterlife, having been returned (perhaps multiple times) to a living body hiding in plain sight on Golarion.
3.) Aroden isn't dead. He just stopped existing in the timelines where his prophecy didn't come true. Prophecy didn't "die," because it never existed except from the retrospective hindsight of people living in the timeline where all prophesies had come true. When the timeline forked, the universe our characters and the "canon" universe exist in went one way, and Aroden and his prophecy went another way, but the Monkey's Paw nature of his prophecy meant that, rather than splitting into parallel selves like most of us do, ALL of his parallel selves in timelines where it failed to come true ceased to exist. Somewhere in the temporal multiverse there is a timeline where Aroden is leading the Chelaxian Empire to glory and founding a second Azlanti Empire, and rather than mourn the loss (from our perspective) of linear predestination, we should be relieved that we do not live in that timeline. Aroden thus can't be brought back because he didn't die, he just stopped existing entirely, and CANNOT exist anymore. The magical equivalent of a 404 Error. Pharasma can't explain what happened because she's just as confused as everyone else. And the gods who normally oversee the flow of time don't say anything because they don't recognise that anything wrong has actually happened, because this was always meant to happen, whatever Pharasma had to say about it.
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1.) Aroden was prophesied to return to Cheliax leading it to a glorious age, but after asking Pharasma about it he realised that the prophecy is double-edged and would have catastrophic consequences.
Aroden caring about the consequences of his actions would certainly be an unexpected twist.
Honestly I headcanon that Aroden destroyed the concept of prophecy after utlizing it for his own ends because he had a bad prophecy coming up that would've prevented his "God King" plans, and then got destroyed for it.
